# Xen support in FreeBSD?



## Mike234534 (Jun 3, 2015)

Basically, is it possible to use FreeBSD as a host for Xen, particularly for hosting paravirtualized guests, with somewhat older hardware which doesn't have proper HW virtualization support?

If not, are there other hypervisors that could be used?


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## junovitch@ (Jun 4, 2015)

Xen support is very new and it is only in the unsupported FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT development branch.  I'm not familiar with the status but here are some helpful links on the topic.

http://empt1e.blogspot.com/2015/06/libvirtlibxl-on-freebsd.html
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Dom0
https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen

bhyve(8) is the native FreeBSD hypervisor but it doesn't support legacy systems.  It requires hardware virtualization features.
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/virtualization-host-bhyve.html

After that it's emulators/virtualbox-ose or emulators/qemu.


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## Mike234534 (Jun 4, 2015)

Looks like Virtualbox 5 will support paravirtualization. Any idea when it will be ported to FreeBSD?


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## SirDice (Jun 4, 2015)

This very much depends on the release of a OSE (Open Source Edition) version. I'm confident as soon as that's released we'll see it appear in the source tree.


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## Mike234534 (Jul 13, 2015)

SirDice said:


> This very much depends on the release of a OSE (Open Source Edition) version. I'm confident as soon as that's released we'll see it appear in the source tree.



Looks like it has been released, what is the status of the FreeBSD port?


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## SirDice (Jul 15, 2015)

Nothing really soon I think. At the moment the focus is on the imminent release of 10.2-RELEASE and later 11.0-RELEASE. 

For more detailed information it's probably best to keep an eye on the freebsd-virtualization@ and/or freebsd-xen@ mailing lists.


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## Oko (Jul 16, 2015)

Mike234534 said:


> Basically, is it possible to use FreeBSD as a host for Xen, particularly for hosting paravirtualized guests, with somewhat older hardware which doesn't have proper HW virtualization support?
> 
> If not, are there other hypervisors that could be used?


Short answer is NO. Not even 11.0. I like Alpine Linux as a Xen Dom0.

https://www.alpinelinux.org/

NetBSD should work fine as well as any Debian derivative. Citrix server IIRC uses Debian for Dom0. I think they also have a free server version.

https://www.citrix.com/products/xenserver/overview.html

RedHat is hostile to Xen. There is some work around for CentOS 6.4. I would not use any RHEL derivative for Dom0.


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