#arpnetworks 2015-03-06,Fri

so you have a hypervisor that runs a series of virtual machines, but the first one gets "direct" access.
and it then has a memory window or such to pass data to other virtual machines for disk/network.

[13:01]

brycec

Ah here we go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor

[13:02]

mercutio

i wonder if i'm making it sound more complicated.

[13:02]

BryceBot

Hypervisor :: A hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM) is a piece of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor is running one or more virtual machines is defined as a host machine. Each virtual machine is called a guest machine. The hypervisor presents the guest operating systems with a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of the guest operating...

[13:02]

brycec

Yeah, dom0 is technically a vm but it's treated special. It's similar, but not identical to the way esx works with having a base OS+Hypervisor

[13:03]

mercutio

brycec: well esxi runs linux ..
you can actually get a linux shell

[13:03]

brycec

brycec knwos

[13:03]

mercutio

so it may actually be quite similar, i haven't really looked uunder the hood much
it has very limited drivers unlike linux
you can't even do software raid with esxi (grr)

[13:03]

brycec

For the sake of simplicity and explaining things to RandalSchwartz...

[13:04]

mercutio

so if you want a test server it's kind of annoying.
brycec: true.
ok yeah, it's like sxi :)
esxi

[13:04]

ant

btw: vmware is currently getting sued for violating the gpl in esxi

[13:05]

mercutio

you can actually host a virtual machine inside esxi that provides storage to esxi.
ant: makes sense.

[13:05]

brycec

virtualception

[13:05]

mercutio

people were doing solaris/opensolaris/etc with zfs inside a virtual machine, then doing nfs from that for the esxi data store.

[13:06]

RandalSchwartz

so I could run xen on my freebsd box, and use linux for the first vm, and freebsd for the other ones?

[13:06]

mercutio

using vt-d to pass through a scsi controller generally, but i don't think that part is /necessary/ it just improves performance.

[13:06]

brycec

Probably. (I don't know much about FreeBSD Xen compatibility)

[13:06]

mercutio

randal: yeah, but you'd do a linuux install, then a xen install, then rnu a freebsd vm.

[13:06]

brycec

(I guess so https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen)

[13:07]

mercutio

tbh i don't relaly think for most people xen is any better than kvm.

[13:07]

brycec

brycec dislikes Xen
Much happier with KVM and the ilk, they don't require any guest customisations

[13:07]

mercutio

it wsa better on older hardware as it had paravirtal vm's. but modern cpus have really accelerated extensions for normal vm's.
and now it's faster to have non paravirtualised.

[13:07]

brycec

If I can't run MSDOS as a virtual machine, what use is it? :P

[13:07]

mercutio

vmware took out it's paravirtal functionality.
i think in esxi 5
xen now has paravirtual, hvm, and a hybrid.
hvm is full virtualisation like kvm.
the only real advantage i find with xen is it makes it easy for me to host kernels outside the virtual environment and boot specific kernels.

[13:08]

grody

oh wow that was not worth it

[13:09]

brycec

twss

[13:09]

BryceBot

Okay! twss! 'oh wow that was not worth it'

[13:09]

mercutio

there's also better support for video/pci device passthrough.

[13:09]

grody

i actually went win 2k8 with hyperv 2012 and it makes xen super user friendly

[13:10]

mercutio

but kvm is working to improve their stuuff, and it's mostly because xen forked qemu. but they're going back to non forked.
so if you want to do video passthrough on xen, at least before, it worked better to use the "legacy" qemu option.

[13:10]

grody

video passthrough on this lenovo in xen was fun

[13:11]

mercutio

by better i mean "it worked" rather than "it failed".

[13:11]

brycec

The way I see it, at least in my workloads, there are two types of useful virtualisation: full machine a la KVM, or containerised a la OpenVZ. Everything else outside that scope is just more complicated than it's worth.
heh

[13:11]

mercutio

brycec: i actually like xen

[13:11]

grody

windows hyperv is fast, but i am seriously disliking it
freebsd guests are still faster in xen tho

[13:12]

mercutio

grody: were you doing paravirtual or full virtual for xen in freebsd?

[13:13]

grody

even more so when you PV fbsd

[13:13]

mercutio

i've tried freebsd with xen and vmware
xen has this annoying problem with mtu's above 1.5k

[13:13]

grody

firstly hvm then pv

[13:13]

mercutio

grody: you should hvm.
it actually works better.
the pvhvm thing should be better still

[13:13]

grody

not hit that yet, doung pfsense with tagged vlans in xen and it seems fine

[13:14]

mercutio

but yeah, there's a hvm kernel config.
grody: this was real larger mtu's
maybe vlan doesn't add enough

[13:14]

grody

[13:14]

mercutio

there's a hard coded limit in some driver.
it's fixable

[13:14]

grody

yea im still legacy 10/100 here

[13:15]

mercutio

i still couldn't do over 2k
but slightly larger worked.
it always erks me when i seem to hit lots of "weird" problems, and other people don't.

[13:15]

grody

haha and you google high and low only to find your question asked but never answered

[13:16]

mercutio

grody: that's what i say haha
grody: and then ytou find out it's been happening for years.
i remember when i heard about the windows uptime bug
it crashed after 48 days of uptime or something with a wrap around.
i'd never hit that buug :/
(i did use that dirty windows for a bit)

[13:16]

grody

xen 4.1 says my mobo doesnt do iommu, but 4.5 is ok with it, couldnt find that one anywhere
i went evil buying a new tablet
i got the linx8 win8.1 .. now running arch

[13:17]

mercutio

grody: it's probably because new motherboard and old scipset.
also 5520 is blackedlisted.

[13:19]

grody

getting a vkeyboard up was fun, had to ssh most of it

[13:20]

mercutio

err blacklisted.
and so vt-d is strictly possible, but things disable it
not that you're using that chipset

[13:20]

grody

mercutio, no idea it is a pain of a lappy
lenovo s205
uefi is skiwiff too

[13:20]

mercutio

i was doing vt-d on z77 for my gpu pass through
not all motherboards supported it.
oh amd
you like amd don't you grody :)

[13:21]

grody

wel for a fraction of pruce to get eq.
its the pepsi of cpus

[13:22]

mercutio

i have ex-lease laptop, it was old when i got it
and a chromebook
i am thinking of sticking that special boot thing on it
linuxbios?
err coreboot it seems now
it has the google one, but if it runs low on battery then it reverts to only booting chromeos.
and it's booting in legacy mode and you have to press ctrl-l as you boot
i kind of wish coreboot was used more by now. i kind of hoped it'd take off. it is interesting that google are using it though
uefi isn't really that wonderful.

[13:23]

BryceBot

That's what she said!!

[13:25]

mercutio

and it's huge and complicated.
really the boot loader should just be doing the init system, then providing resources to the initial os.
err hardware init
i'm ok with things like a little gui to overclock, and update bios from the gui etc.
but in the normal course of boot it should juust do the minimum, and not have a hugely massive api
http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/2_4_Errata_B.pdf

[13:25]

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[13:33]

grody

that was fun

[13:36]

mercutio

what was?

[13:42]

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brycec

This turned out to be pretty entertaining http://www.therestartpage.com/
(click things, move windows, fiddlw with stuff. It's interactive.)

[15:14]

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RandalSchwartz

heh... that's cute
I'm booting openstep
Steve's Soul powers these machines. :)

[15:36]

grody

ok i hate windows hyperv
im going back to debian xen
it lags like hell running freebsd guests
linux is fast as hell mind

[15:49]

mercutio

network lag?

[15:59]

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mercutio

is anyone else seeing ping spikes to 4.2.2.2 but fine to 4.2.2.1. i assume 4.2.2.2 is probably getting ddos'ed or something, it's just curious and my usual "test ip"

[23:38]

brycec

I don't monitor it... But I'm not surprised
4.2.2.2 is the ip "everybody" knows and hits
4.2.2.1 is far less-known

[23:44]

acf_

mercutio: 4.2.2.2 has always had terrible ping latencies for me
http://kremvax.acfsys.net/smokeping.cgi?target=Remote.l3dns

[23:44]

mercutio

acf: it's been mostly fine for me before
i don't monitor to it i just check internet stuff with it at the time
wow it's really bad for you since like the end of june
but before that it was fine
is that on a vm?

[23:45]

acf_

no, that's ARP Metal

[23:47]

mercutio

interesting

[23:47]

acf_

yea, it's super strange

[23:47]

mercutio

i was just lookig athe localhost ping time
i suppose it's pretty stable, it jut seems high
mine sits around 10u on an i3-2100

[23:47]

acf_

http://paste.unixcube.org/k/479429

[23:48]

mercutio

yeah i'd already tried from arp native
well vm on arp

[23:48]

acf_

yea, it's not going through anything strange afiact

[23:48]

mercutio

but i did manage to test from one location that seemed better
it was better when it hit san jose 4.2.2.2 rather than los angeles 4.2.2.2

[23:48]

acf_

ah right, that's anycast

[23:49]

mercutio

yeah, but los angeles seems worse than san jose
like way worse

[23:49]

acf_

maybe I should start monitoring 4.2.2.1

[23:49]

mercutio

i haven't got historic data, and you do :)
i wondered if it was some new ddos or something
i had weird slow gtt behave earlier today
then i saw someone reporting about gtt issues on outages

[23:49]

acf_

is *that* what that was

[23:50]

mercutio

oh you noticed weird gtt shit?
it was pretty chronically bad.

[23:50]

acf_

I didn't have much time to debug at the time
but something was clearly not right

[23:50]

mercutio

i still don't know who gtt is compromised of properly.
but their network seems a badly managed hodge podge atm
i think it's gtt, tinet, nlayer, mzima, and someone else

[23:51]

acf_

something like that
I guess gtt just bought everyone up

[23:52]

mercutio

what

[23:52]

acf_

and didn't really try to integrate anything

[23:52]

mercutio

try goign to www.gtt.net

[23:52]

acf_

umm

[23:52]

mercutio

it's not loading, and saying "checking your browser before accessing gtt.net"

[23:52]

acf_

yea

[23:52]

mercutio

and to allow up to 5 seconds
it's been way more than 5 seconds.

[23:52]

acf_

appears to be some Cloudflare anti-ddos thing

[23:53]

mercutio

yeah
so gtt had massive ddos attacks today i imagine
i thought gtt were bigger than cloudflare
it's kind of scary when gtt are doing anti-ddos protection with cloudflare and their main web site doesn't even work

[23:53]

acf_

I think cloudflare are super experts at anti-DDOS though

[23:54]

mercutio

what's that web host tracker thingy

[23:54]

acf_

for HTTP anyway

[23:54]

mercutio

the one that usedd to say about apache vs iis