BSDCan '06 Hypervisors and FreeBSD

I just came across a presentation given by Kip Macy at BSDCan '06. It provides some interesting architectural details on memory management.

Bitvisor Hypervisor

Evidently there is a hypervisor being developed at the University of Tsukuba called Bitvisor. They advertise it as supporting Windows XP, Vista, 64-bit Linux, and 32-bit FreeBSD. The only mention in English of it was a presentation at BlackHat in August, "A Hypervisor IPS based on Hardware Assisted Virtualization Technology." It is fairly immature as compared with Xen. Nonetheless, if they bridge the language gap it might see some niche vendor uptake due to its BSD license.

FreeBSD and NetBSD developers should follow up with them to see if they might benefit from integrating support in to their mainline.

The BSDs and Xen

Of the BSDs NetBSD has by far the most mature support for Xen, supporting 32-bit, 64-bit, and dom0. There is no indication that it supports PAE guests.

You can find out more about it on the NetBSD site.

The current maintainer is Manuel Bouyer.


The development of support for FreeBSD has been rather off and on. There is currently active development going on, but it remains to be seen if it will develop the same level of maturity as NetBSD. It currently *only* runs as a domU in PAE mode.

You can find out more about on the FreeBSD wiki.

The developer is Kip Macy.


An OpenBSD port was done. Unfortunately, Theo de Raadt does not feel that it is something he wants as part of the tree.

Cheers,
BSD Tech

Opening day

Welcome to the first post of the BSD Research blog. We will be discussing topics related to security and virtualization on the *BSDs.

We hope you find it interesting.