An early rough cut of the vmm subsystem is now in the tree. This includes both
the kernel parts and userland parts.

There are still lots of things that need to be fixed and improved. For this
reason, it is still disabled by default.

But there is enough there for people to start playing with running OpenBSD VMs.

To get this in the tree faster, I temporarily removed some code that had rotted
in my tree (SVM, i386, shadow paging, etc). I still have the last versions of
those pieces, and they will get merged back in due time once I have the time
to merge the changes back in and re-test.

As we don't presently emulate a BIOS, the bootloader and kernel loading is
built into vmd(8). Presently, vmd(8) knows about OpenBSD kernels, nothing more.
It should be a fairly simple effort to add support for other ELF kernel types
(I did NetBSD one night in an hour as a one-off experiment).

I'm not going to explain all the how-tos at this point. This is because vmmctl
is going to have a pretty significant change coming in shortly, and anything
I would write here on "how to use it" is just going to end up changing anyway.
If you want to get started now, you can read the man page.

As this is a very early version of the subsystem, you can and should expect
breakage. There are many things left on my list that need to get cleaned up
before I'd consider enabling things by default.

-ml

Reply via email to