Comments on: Many vkernel changes https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2017/02/03/many-vkernel-changes/ A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD. Sat, 04 Feb 2017 06:58:06 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Anonymous https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2017/02/03/many-vkernel-changes/comment-page-1/#comment-486085 Sat, 04 Feb 2017 06:58:06 +0000 https://www.dragonflydigest.com/?p=19271#comment-486085 Excellent explanation, thank you!

]]> By: Justin https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2017/02/03/many-vkernel-changes/comment-page-1/#comment-486082 Sat, 04 Feb 2017 01:51:34 +0000 https://www.dragonflydigest.com/?p=19271#comment-486082 vkernels are close to what Jimmy described – a regular kernel running as a user process. It’s lightweight, similar to jails, except that it’s completely self-contained, like a virtual machine. Sort of a best of both worlds, in my opinion, but it’s only useful if you’re running DragonFly, on DragonFly.

It was originally designed for development, because you can test kernel changes, boot them, and if you have a crash you can come back in a few seconds instead of having to reboot a machine. It’s never been optimized for speed, though I daresay most of the VM/jail implementations out there are not built for speed anyway.

An interesting project would be to treat a vkernel as a container, and see how well they could be deployed/scripted. Something to describe relative performance would also be helpful – I don’t know where they take a hit compared to ‘bare metal’.

]]> By: Jimmy https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2017/02/03/many-vkernel-changes/comment-page-1/#comment-486081 Fri, 03 Feb 2017 23:40:35 +0000 https://www.dragonflydigest.com/?p=19271#comment-486081 I think, but am not certain, that since vkernel pushes kernel processing to the user land – it’s can speed up things like networking.

But I could be wrong.

]]> By: Anonymous https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2017/02/03/many-vkernel-changes/comment-page-1/#comment-486080 Fri, 03 Feb 2017 21:55:01 +0000 https://www.dragonflydigest.com/?p=19271#comment-486080 Are vkernels mostly used for development and debugging purposes or are there other scenarios where they would be useful?

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