xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/xen.4 (revision 4f2ef756a404df70272b79c16fa7b1689cb0118b)

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.Dd January 8, 2024
.Dt XEN 4
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm xen
.Nd Xen Hypervisor Support
.Sh SYNOPSIS
FreeBSD supports running both as a Xen guest and host on amd64 hardware.
Guest support is limited to HVM and PVH modes, while host support is limited to
PVH mode only.
.Pp
Xen support is built by default in the i386 and amd64 GENERIC kernels; note
however that host mode is only available on amd64.
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The Xen Hypervisor allows multiple virtual machines to be run on a single
computer system.
When first released, Xen required that i386 kernels be compiled
"para-virtualized" as the x86 instruction set was not fully virtualizable.
Primarily, para-virtualization modifies the virtual memory system to use
hypervisor calls (hypercalls) rather than direct hardware instructions to
modify the TLB, although para-virtualized device drivers were also required
to access resources such as virtual network interfaces and disk devices.
.Pp
With later instruction set extensions from AMD and Intel to support fully
virtualizable instructions, unmodified virtual memory systems can also be
supported; this is referred to as hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM and PVH).
HVM configurations may either rely on transparently emulated hardware
peripherals, or para-virtualized drivers, which are aware of virtualization,
and hence able to optimize certain behaviors to improve performance or
semantics.
PVH configurations rely on para-virtualized drivers exclusively for IO.
.Pp
.Fx
Para-virtualized device drivers are required in order to support certain
functionality, such as processing management requests, returning idle
physical memory pages to the hypervisor, etc.
.Ss Xen device drivers
These para-virtualized drivers are supported:
.Bl -hang -offset indent -width blkfront
.It Nm balloon
Allow physical memory pages to be returned to the hypervisor as a result of
manual tuning or automatic policy.
.It Nm blkback
Exports local block devices or files to other Xen domains where they can
then be imported via
.Nm blkfront .
.It Nm blkfront
Import block devices from other Xen domains as local block devices, to be
used for file systems, swap, etc.
.It Nm console
Export the low-level system console via the Xen console service.
.It Nm control
Process management operations from Domain 0, including power off, reboot,
suspend, crash, and halt requests.
.It Nm evtchn
Expose Xen events via the
.Pa /dev/xen/evtchn
special device.
.It Nm gntdev
Allow access to the grant table interface via the
.Pa /dev/xen/gntdev
special device.
.It Nm netback
Export local network interfaces to other Xen domains where they can be
imported via
.Nm netfront .
.It Nm netfront
Import network interfaces from other Xen domains as local network interfaces,
which may be used for IPv4, IPv6, etc.
.It Nm privcmd
Allow issuing hypercalls via the
.Pa /dev/xen/privcmd
special device.
.It Nm timer
Implementation of a one-shot high resolution per-CPU timer using the hypercall
interface.
.It Nm acpi cpu
When running as a host forwards power management related information from ACPI
to the hypervisor for better performance management.
.It Nm xenpci
Represents the Xen PCI device, an emulated PCI device that is exposed to
HVM domains.
This device allows detection of the Xen hypervisor, and provides interrupt
and shared memory services required to interact with the hypervisor.
.It Nm xenstore
Information storage space shared between domains.
.El
.Sh HISTORY
Support for
.Nm
first appeared in
.Fx 8.1 .
Support for host mode was added in 11.0 .
.Sh AUTHORS
.An -nosplit
.Fx
support for Xen was first added by
.An Kip Macy Aq Mt kmacy@FreeBSD.org
and
.An Doug Rabson Aq Mt dfr@FreeBSD.org .
Further refinements were made by
.An Justin Gibbs Aq Mt gibbs@FreeBSD.org ,
.An Adrian Chadd Aq Mt adrian@FreeBSD.org ,
.An Colin Percival Aq Mt cperciva@FreeBSD.org ,
and
.An Roger Pau Monné Aq Mt royger@FreeBSD.org .
This manual page was written by
.An Robert Watson Aq Mt rwatson@FreeBSD.org ,
and
.An Roger Pau Monné Aq Mt royger@FreeBSD.org .