FreeBSD 9.0 guest with virtio support in KVM

Oct 14, 2011 - freebsd kvm virtio

Performance are really bad for FreeBSD in KVM, one solution is to use paravirtualized driver, virIO.

At the time of writing FreeBSD 9.0 is beta 3 and the last commit in the virtio project is 225710

cd /usr/src/sys/dev
svn co http://svn.freebsd.org/base/projects/virtio/sys/dev/virtio
cd /usr/src/sys/modules
svn co http://svn.freebsd.org/base/projects/virtio/sys/modules/virtio
cd /usr/src/sys/modules/virtio

make install

add this to /boot/loader.conf

virtio_load="YES"
virtio_pci_load="YES"
virtio_blk_load="YES"
if_vtnet_load="YES"
virtio_balloon_load="YES"

# dmesg | grep -i  virtio
vtnet0:  on virtio_pci0
virtio_pci1:  port 0xc060-0xc07f irq 11 at device 4.0 on pci0
vtballoon0:  on virtio_pci1
virtio_pci2:  port 0xc080-0xc0bf mem 0xf2040000-0xf2040fff irq 10 at device 5.0 on pci0
vtblk0:  on virtio_pci2

It needs further tests, but seems to work except for the net driver which give me no links, (you can still use the previous net driver in KVM)

EDIT: the vtnet driver issue is solve and should be in the trunk

See Also