On 22/10/2007, Nick Guenther <kousue@gmail.com> wrote:
quoted text
> On 10/22/07, ropers <ropers@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 22/10/2007, carlopmart <carlopmart@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > >   I know that time to time somebody do the same question, but I need to know it:
> > > is it planned at some point to release a paravirtualized xen kernel for OpenBSD
> > > 4.3 or 4.4???
> >
> > It already exists. You can run OpenBSD DomUs (ie. run OpenBSD as a Xen
> > "guest"**), but AFAIK you still can't run OpenBSD Dom0s (ie. run
> > OpenBSD as a Xen "host"**).
> >
> > See http://www.ropersonline.com/openbsd/xen/
> >
> > ** This is a flawed metaphor, because Xen is a _hypervisor_, NOT an
> > emulator. The Domain U installs are not really running as guest OSes,
> > and the Domain zero installations are not really running as host OSes.
> > But you need at least one Dom0 (which when I last looked into this
> > still could not be OpenBSD) and you can install OpenBSD as a DomU.
> >
>
> So that means that OpenBSD has code in it right now that detects if
> it's running under Xen and paravirtualizes itself?
>
> -Nick

Not as far as I know, but I know very little.

AFAIK, it's still necessary to clone the Mercurial (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial_%28software%29 ) VCS (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control_system ) as described
here: http://www.ropersonline.com/openbsd/xen/openbsd-xen-howto

As far as I gathered, Christoph's effort has not been widely
publicised and may not even be known to even some hard core OpenBSD
people.

I also seemed to gather that at some point there might have been some
concerns regarding running OpenBSD as a DomU or similar, because it
removes some of the security benefits, so there might be a trade-off
there. A DomU is not the same as a true standalone server, though I
personally would welcome the incorporation of Christoph's code into
OpenBSD, if only because I hope to save hosting costs and still run
OpenBSD.

But I could be very wrong in all of the above, and I don't want to
start rumours. If you want to get proper, authoritative answers, you
should probably ask Theo and Christoph (though it might benefit the
archives to cc the misc list).

Thanks and regards,
--ropers