Debian Xen & FreeBSD

After installing Debian (etch) on one of my servers, I was perplexed by the fact that I couldn’t boot FreeBSD guests. After checking the FreeBSD Xen wiki I realized that FreeBSD works with more recent versions of the Xen hypervisor, which Debian does not currently use in their prebuilt packages.

The easiest way to fix this was to download and compile Xen from source, using this article from HowToForge as a cheat sheet.

I’m still not sure which way to go for virtual private server solutions. Xen is great since you can choose different kernels and you can impose hard limits on RAM, but you pay for it with CPU overhead. FreeBSD jails on the other hand are extremely lightweight and easy to upgrade. The downside is that resource limits are difficult, if not impossible to enforce.