Re: warning of pending commit attempt.

Brooks Davis wrote:
On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 08:44:56PM -0800, Julian Elischer wrote:
At some stage in the next few weeks I will be trying to commit
Marco Zec's vimage code to -current. (only 'trying' not
for technical reasons, but political).

I'm making this announcement because this is sure to be a controversial move.

For those of you who do NOT know what it is, please go to
the following website:

http://imunes.tel.fer.hr/virtnet/

This project has been going for a whle and has been in production
in its earlier versions in several places.

The current version referred to in the code is implemented in
a manner that allows it to be COMPILED OUT. so that those who
do not want the risk or teh performance gain/loss (yes it
surprisingly seems to actually speed up some things) can
compile it out and have a system that for all intents and
purposes, is as it is now.

Is this true to the level of checksums of .o files?

No. There are some minor reorganisations of where some variables are, and some minor changes but they are pretty easy to confirm as being "functionally equivalent". Macros are used to do a lot but there are some places where it was not possible to hide it behind a macro, so small re-orgs were required.. they really are small in comparison to
the whole work though, and as I said. quite "provable".



what do we gain?
Jail on steroids
A framework that can be extended to other virtualisation avenues.
The ability to have full virtual machines on almost any layout
of physical hardware.

Why now?
The code is in a shape where teh compiled out version of hte system is stable. In the compiled in version, it is functional
enough to provide nearly all of what people want. It needs people with other interests to adapt it to their purposes and use it so that it can become a solid product for future releases.

The website has a snapshot with a date over a month old and many
comments about unstable interfaces. I've seen zero reports of
substantial testing...

I and others have run it but there are obviously things to still do.
there is of course a limited amount of testing that a couple of people
can do. having said that I feel comfortable with it now or I wouldn't
have sugested this. As I said teh compiled out version is much easier to verify, and this would give a much larger testing population.


Solaris and Linux have seen what BSD can do with jails and have upped
the ante. it's time for FreeBSD to tak our jails to teh next logical
step.

As it will be committed it does have some missing parts to the jigsaw, but it is complete enough that a system compiled in this manner can
be fully functional and fully backwards compatible.

Basically no userland changes need be made to get the full effect.

I expect the usual nay-sayers no matter what is proposed, but
I hope we can have a decent discussion about this..

From purely procedural perspective, the "next few weeks" seems rushed and
poorly motivated. We're still finding and fixing bugs from the last
major round of network changes. We should at least get the first batch
of 7.0 errata out the door before making changes that will certain make
merging non-trivial network stack changes more difficult. We also need
credible, qualitative reports verifying that it works and what it's
impacts are.

I say the next few weeks because we need it to happen NOW and
not "just before 8.0" It's been tested and run for over a year.
how much more do you want? No-one is talking about puting it in 7.0
yet, but I don't want to make the same mistake we made when we didn't put it in -current when 6.x was done. (slight hyperbole there... :-)




Don't get me wrong. I think this is interesting work and that it could
be a major asset to FreeBSD. I also recognize that it should go in
in the next 6-9 months (12 at the outside) if it's not going to cause
problems with 8.0. I simply don't see any valid motivation for doing it
with undue haste.

This is not haste.. this has been waiting in the wings fo rover a
year. I'd like to see it in -current at most 2 months after 7.0 hits
the streets. We need to give it soak time and get people up to speed
on how to extend it and other virtual facilities, and probably
for feedback to resolt in design fixes so that wen 8.0 gets out the
door we have something that we can really be proud of.



-- Brooks

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