FreeBSD 8 and XEN

[cougarmaster]

Hi,
  Really like to know if there will be a pv kernel ready for XEN? It would really benefit people to dedicate NICs to pfsense in this way and have much better thru put.

Tks in advance
Eric

[black0ut]

I recently played around with FreeBSD 8 as a PV domU, and I wasn't able to get it running (host was Debian Lenny, Xen 4.0 with 2.6.32 kernel).  Some other people seem to have had success, but it is still very unpolished.

OTOH, throughput in HVM doesn't seem that bad at all, and it seems to be fully supported (pfsense 2.0/FreeBSD 8).

[cougarmaster]

Hi black0ut
  Yes HVM is working for me pfsense 1.2.3 and been installing these on many of my clients servers under xen. Most have been running for over 6 months. Also making the model=e1000 in xen config makes the thruput much better than using 8139.

Eric

[jonnytabpni]

@cougarmaster:

Hi black0ut
   Yes HVM is working for me pfsense 1.2.3 and been installing these on many of my clients servers under xen. Most have been running for over 6 months. Also making the model=e1000 in xen config makes the thruput much better than using 8139.

Eric

Hi Eric,

What kind of throughput are you getting? Using the e1000 for the LAN side, and a "PCI Passthrough" for the WAN, I was getting capped at around 90Mbps. The e1000 I think is supposed to be a gigabit NIC?

[cougarmaster]

Hi jonnytabpni,
  I usually setup my network using two physical nics and one DMZ virtual. I cannot pass my pci cause my hardware specs don't support it. I used to use the default settings which gave reasonable speed from internal routing and transfer of files to max of 6MB/s and the network is running 10/100Mbps. After I changed to using e1000 drivers it went up to 8-9MB/s. Didn't have a chance to use Gigabit networks yet, since my clients are stingy bastards. My system config is :-

AMD 5000+
                        4GB DDR 800
                        Onboard 10/100/1000Mbps nic
                        PCI 8139D 10/100Mbps nic
                        500GB x 2 Raid 1 SATAII

Debian Lenny 64bit
                        XEN 3.3.2

[jonnytabpni]

Did you use just the standard interrupt mode or did you enable "Device Polling"? With 2 e1000 virtual NICs, I'm getting capped at around 60Mbp/s

[cougarmaster]

I enabled Device Polling.

[fastcon68]

I have not seen a kernal for it yest.  I have seen a Citrix with a pvm kernal but nothing yet for the public.
RC