Provided by: freebsd-manpages_11.1-3_all 
NAME
xen — Xen Hypervisor Guest (DomU) Support
SYNOPSIS
To compile hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM) Xen guest support with para-virtualized drivers into an
amd64 or i386 kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file:
options XENHVM
device xenpci
DESCRIPTION
The Xen Hypervisor allows multiple virtual machines to be run on a single computer system. When first
released, Xen required that i386 kernels be compiled "para-virtualized" as the x86 instruction set was not
fully virtualizable. Primarily, para-virtualization modifies the virtual memory system to use hypervisor
calls (hypercalls) rather than direct hardware instructions to modify the TLB, although para-virtualized
device drivers were also required to access resources such as virtual network interfaces and disk devices.
With later instruction set extensions from AMD and Intel to support fully virtualizable instructions,
unmodified virtual memory systems can also be supported; this is referred to as hardware-assisted
virtualization (HVM). HVM configurations may either rely on transparently emulated hardware peripherals,
or para-virtualized drivers, which are aware of virtualization, and hence able to optimize certain
behaviors to improve performance or semantics.
FreeBSD supports hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM) on both i386 and amd64 kernels.
Para-virtualized device drivers are required in order to support certain functionality, such as processing
management requests, returning idle physical memory pages to the hypervisor, etc.
Xen DomU device drivers
These para-virtualized drivers are supported:
balloon Allow physical memory pages to be returned to the hypervisor as a result of manual tuning
or automatic policy.
blkback Exports local block devices or files to other Xen domains where they can then be imported
via blkfront.
blkfront Import block devices from other Xen domains as local block devices, to be used for file
systems, swap, etc.
console Export the low-level system console via the Xen console service.
control Process management operations from Domain 0, including power off, reboot, suspend, crash,
and halt requests.
evtchn Expose Xen events via the /dev/xen/evtchn special device.
netback Export local network interfaces to other Xen domains where they can be imported via
netfront.
netfront Import network interfaces from other Xen domains as local network interfaces, which may be
used for IPv4, IPv6, etc.
pcifront Allow physical PCI devices to be passed through into a PV domain.
xenpci Represents the Xen PCI device, an emulated PCI device that is exposed to HVM domains. This
device allows detection of the Xen hypervisor, and provides interrupt and shared memory
services required to interact with the hypervisor.
Performance considerations
In general, PV drivers will perform better than emulated hardware, and are the recommended configuration
for HVM installations.
Using a hypervisor introduces a second layer of scheduling that may limit the effectiveness of certain
FreeBSD scheduling optimisations. Among these is adaptive locking, which is no longer able to determine
whether a thread holding a lock is in execution. It is recommended that adaptive locking be disabled when
using Xen:
options NO_ADAPTIVE_MUTEXES
options NO_ADAPTIVE_RWLOCKS
options NO_ADAPTIVE_SX
HISTORY
Support for xen first appeared in FreeBSD 8.1.
AUTHORS
FreeBSD support for Xen was first added by Kip Macy <kmacy@FreeBSD.org> and Doug Rabson <dfr@FreeBSD.org>. Further refinements were made by Justin Gibbs <gibbs@FreeBSD.org>, Adrian Chadd <adrian@FreeBSD.org>, and Colin Percival <cperciva@FreeBSD.org>. This manual page was written by Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>.
BUGS
FreeBSD is only able to run as a Xen guest (DomU) and not as a Xen host (Dom0).
As of this release, Xen PV DomU support is not heavily tested; instability has been reported during VM
migration of PV kernels.
Certain PV driver features, such as the balloon driver, are under-exercised.