The arrow of time

I'm glad to say that virtualization is finally happening for FreeBSD - it's the one area which was almost completely side-stepped in the last decade (except of course jails and vimages, which are of very limited usability in modern heterogenous environments).

We've had VirtualBox working for some time now, but that was (and largely still is) the only full-featured virtualization environment which can be hosted on FreeBSD. The guest side is almost as under-developed, with the open-sourced VMWare tools and Xen DomU (unfinished) being the only guest paravirtualization support.

Now, BHyVe seems to be progressing nicely - it's the FreeBSD equivalent of Linux's KVM hypervisor, and there's even talk of finishing Xen Dom0 support.

The client side is (finally) boosted by having in-tree virtio drivers.

From a complately unexpected direction, a consortium of big companies including Microsoft, Cirtix and NetApp have sponsored the development of native guest support for FreeBSD, enabling it to run as a first-class guest under Hyper-V.

I regret I wasn't able to attend many of the BSDCan talks due to timing overlaps, but fortunately it looks like at least some of them have been recorded and will probably be published on YouTube.

From the ones I did, I'd especially recommend the talk on FreeBSD kernel locs given by the legendary Kirk McKusick and the introduction to FusionIO by Julian Elischer.