News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on FreeBSD 10.2. Parent comment

Re:FreeBSD 10.2 by bmir-alum-007 on Thursday August 13, 2015 @09:47PM (#10058222)
Btw, thanks for FreeBSD compat work for running on AWS/Xen, even if it might've been mostly to host Tarsnap on it. ;)

It's possible to run a NetBSD Xen dom0 (host system) on bare metal, under VMware or Xen HVM: it takes a few patches, building a kernel and config tweaks to get going but it works stably. [0] (There's no XAPI (the Xen remote management API) support however, so XenServer tools and other 3rd-party XAPI integrations probably won't work. FYI: XAPI server-side is coded in OCaml; don't ask how I know that. ;) [1])

For most people w/ baremetal or rented colo that just want a turn-key supportable hypervisor, I would advise using Citrix XenServer (commercial official Xen, free download, it seems be more stable than XCP and includes XAPI) or VMware ESXi (free download, very stable, $$$ quickly). After that, you can run whatever OS/es you like. (IIRC a ton of AWS boxes run heavily-modified Xen open-source 3.3.x.)

For desktop/laptop dev: VirtualBox, VMware Fusion/Workstation or qemu.

References:

0. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/xen/howto/

1. https://github.com/xapi-project/xen-api

EDIT: pronouns

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:FreeBSD 10.2 by cperciva on Thursday August 13, 2015 @10:08PM (#10058282)
FreeBSD compat work on AWS/Xen

I did no such thing. My work was all to add AWS/Xen compatibility to FreeBSD. :-)

In all serious though, while wanting to host Tarsnap on an OS I knew and trusted was my justification for spending so much time on FreeBSD/EC2, my actual reason had more to do with wanting to make sure that FreeBSD didn't fall behind.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:FreeBSD 10.2 by bmir-alum-007 on Thursday August 13, 2015 @10:28PM (#10058321)
Ah cool. Adoption is like a stochastic transfer function with a dependent variable "modern usability."

Speaking of usability, here's a patch to libfetch to ignore crusty ftp server non-RFC spurious responses https://gist.github.com/steakknife/b4772a5deb6afc8851e0 (I have absolute zero idea how to contribute code/patches to FreeBSD or it's not obvious/easy from docs.)

s/on/for/ That's what I meant. ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:FreeBSD 10.2 by pjmlp on Friday August 14, 2015 @03:09AM (#10058984)
> XAPI server-side is coded in OCaml; don't ask how I know that.

Everyone that follows Mirage should know that. ;)

I remember Anil saying something about it in one of his talks, if I am not mistaken.

[ Parent | on HN ]