Virtual virtual virtual fragging?

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:35:00 +0100

An oft-cited criticism of virtualisation is that 3D hardware acceleration doesn't work, preventing you from enjoying your hard-earnt game of Quake 3. Rumours abound that Parallels is developing it for its software, and that VMware is doing something in this area as well.

However, thanks to the Google SoC, the power of open-source itching, and the talented Andrés Lagar-Cavilla, Xen now has support for 3D acceleration as well! Check out the xen-gl web-page with screenshots, or just clone xen-gl.hg and get hacking!

Rather than getting down and dirty with foreign grant mappings, PCI pass-through and all that malarky, Andres adopted for the more pragmatic approach of packetising OpenGL using the Chromium project, and creating an x.org module to correctly position the resulting OpenGL. End result: hardware rendering in a guest domain, without requiring any extra hardware privileges. Awesome to the max!

OpenBSD/Xen boots multi-user

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 18:08:00 +0100

I've been mentoring a few Xen projects as part of the Google Summer of Code program. One of the most fun is the OpenBSD/Xen porting effort which Christoph Egger has been hacking on. As of a few days ago, if you clone the Mercurial repository for the project, openbsd-xen-sys.hg, and build the kernel with with the i386 bsd.rd, you get the thrill of the following boot log:

[avsm@kremlin ~]$ sudo xm create -c openbsd
Using config file "/etc/xen/openbsd".
Started domain OpenBSD
[ using 187532 bytes of bsd ELF symbol table ]
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
        The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1995-2006 OpenBSD. All rights reserved.  http://www.OpenBSD.org

OpenBSD 4.0-beta (RAMDISK_XENU) #0: Mon Aug 21 14:59:09 BST 2006
    root@mortar.cl.cam.ac.uk:/usr/src/sys/arch/xen/compile/ RAMDISK_XENU
cpu0: Genuine Intel(R) CPU 3.00GHz ("GenuineIntel" 686-class) 3 GHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,MCA,CMOV,
    PAT,PSE36,CFLUSH,ACPI,MMX,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,SBF,PNI,
    EST,CNXT-ID
cpu0: EST: unknown system bus clock
real mem  = 62554112 (61088K)
avail mem = 55603200 (54300K)
using 789 buffers containing 3231744 bytes (3156K) of memory
mainbus0 (root)
cpu0 at mainbus0
hypervisor0 at mainbus0
debug virtual interrupt using event channel 3
xenbus0 at hypervisor0: Xen Virtual Bus Interface
xencons0 at hypervisor0: Xen Virtual Console Driver
xencons0: console major 86, unit 0
xencons0: using event channel 2
npx0 at hypervisor0: using exception 16
Xen clock: using event channel 4
rd0: fixed, 3800 blocks
xenbus0: using event channel 1
xennet0 at xenbus0 id 0: Xen Virtual Network Interface
xennet0: MAC address 00:16:3e:05:83:11
xennet0: using event channel 5
root on rd0a
rootdev=0x1100 rrootdev=0x2f00 rawdev=0x2f02
erase ^?, werase ^W, kill ^U, intr ^C, status ^T
(I)nstall, (U)pgrade or (S)hell?

Christoph has done a superb job of porting the NetBSD/Xen code over to OpenBSD. There are still a few bugs to be worked out in the networking driver, the virtual block driver to finish up, and the rather more messy job of getting the user-land tools to run if we want an OpenBSD dom0. But this initial booting is fantastic to see!

A final nice teaser from the console shell:

# ifconfig -a
lo0: flags=8008<LOOPBACK,MULTICAST> mtu 33224
        groups: lo
pflog0: flags=0<> mtu 33224
pfsync0: flags=0<> mtu 1460
        groups: carp
enc0: flags=0<> mtu 1536
xennet0: flags=8822<BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        lladdr 00:16:3e:05:83:11
        media: Ethernet autoselect (autoselect)

No Content, No Fuss: Category xen

Virtual virtual virtual fragging?

OpenBSD/Xen boots multi-user