For people who want to deploy unRAID as a VM in a XEN environment, it would be great if the webGUI recognized /dev/xvdX drives so that VMs can be deployed as para-virt versus hvm, thus greatly increasing network/disk throughput.

 

This feature seems like it would be either really easy or really hard to add, depending on whether or not the xenblk module needs to be modified.

 

EDIT: Also, if the devs see this and don't feel like setting up XEN themselves, I will happily beta test for them

 

EDIT2: If a developer could tell me if the detection method is in the open source part versus the closed source emhttp, I would happily go and modify it myself.

 

EDIT3: Also, do devs even read the forums?  Would it be faster to just email them?

Would it be faster to just email them?

 

Probably, though I doubt something like this is high on the TODO list.

EDIT2: If a developer could tell me if the detection method is in the open source part versus the closed source emhttp, I would happily go and modify it myself.

I am not affiliated with Lime-Tech, but I can tell you for certain this is definitely in the closed source emhttp. 

EDIT3: Also, do devs even read the forums?  Would it be faster to just email them?

They read the forums, but their focus is on bugs and the new 5.0beta series.  You can certainly e-mail them.

 

Joe L.

Yeah, I emailed them about this a couple months ago, and the turnaround was fairly slow.  I figured it would be in emhttp.

 

Without looking at the code, I can't say for sure, but I have a gut feeling that this is a very simple change.

 

As for being low priority, unraid on XEN is amazingly useful as it lets you use the otherwise wasted cpu/ram for other services.  The fact that unRAID doesn't work in PV mode is especially annoying because it means that the unRAID VM can only communicate at 100Mbit with the rest of the 1Gbit network; streaming HD from the fileserver is one of the main reasons I set it up, and it buffers a lot .

You can always go the other way around, using a full Slackware distro with unRAID. Then you can use this Slackware distro as the host OS for kvm, xen, vmWare, or VirtualBox to run your other needs if you're not able to run them on Slackware directly.

Yeah, I was considering that, but running services in the dom0 seems like asking for trouble in terms of security.  Also, I'm using OpenSUSE for the dom0 because it has the best support for xen 4.0 with non-pvops kernel (which I need due to networking bugs with the pvops kernel).