Open Stack

On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 10:19 PM, Joe Gordon <joe.gordon0 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 10:04 AM, Roman Bogorodskiy <rbogorodskiy at mirantis.com> wrote:
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>> Hi,
>>
>> In discussion of this spec proposal:
>> https://review.openstack.org/#/c/127827/ it was suggested by Joe Gordon
>> to start a discussion on the mailing list.
>>
>> So I'll share my thoughts and a long term plan on adding FreeBSD host
>> support for OpenStack.
>>
>> An ultimate goal is to allow using libvirt/bhyve as a compute driver.
>> However, I think it would be reasonable to start with libvirt/qemu
>> support first as it will allow to prepare the ground.
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> Before diving into the technical details below, I have one question. Why, What is the benefit of this, besides the obvious 'we not support FreeBSD'?  Adding support for a new kernel introduces yet another column in our support matrix, and will require a long term commitment to testing and maintaining OpenStack on FreeBSD.

There a number of FreeBSD users that are interested in virtualization
and an effective
management of the virtualized resources. Using OpenStack would be much
more convenient
than using some custom scripts / home grown solutions people usually use now.

>>
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>> High level overview of what needs to be done:
>>
>>  - Nova
>>   * linux_net needs to be re-factored to allow to plug in FreeBSD
>>     support (that's what the spec linked above is about)
>>   * nova.virt.disk.mount needs to be extended to support FreeBSD's
>>     mdconfig(8) in a similar way to Linux's losetup
>>  - Glance and Keystone
>>     These components are fairly free of system specifics. Most likely
>>     they will require some small fixes like e.g. I made for Glance
>>     https://review.openstack.org/#/c/94100/
>>  - Cinder
>>     I didn't look close at Cinder from a porting perspective, tbh.
>>     Obviously, it'll need some backend driver that would work on
>>     FreeBSD, e.g. ZFS. I've seen some patches floating around for ZFS
>>     though. Also, I think it'll need an implementation of iSCSI stack
>>     on FreeBSD, because it has its own stack, not stgt. On the other
>>     hand, Cinder is not required for a minimal installation and that
>>     could be done after adding support of the other components.
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> What about neutron? We are in the process of trying to deprecate nova-network, so any new thing needs to support neutron.


AFAIK, there's no defined migration plan yet, unless I missed that.
Anyway, I don't see any blockers regarding an implementation of a driver
similar to linuxbridge that'd work on FreeBSD.

Also, Semihalf guys are working on OpenContail/FreeBSD and
Neutron/OpenContrial support, so that's an option as well.


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>> Also, it's worth to mention that a discussion on this topic already
>> happened on this maillist:
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>> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-March/031431.html
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>> Some of the limitations were resolved since then, specifically,
>> libvirt/bhyve has no limitation on count of disk and ethernet devices
>> anymore.
>>
>> Roman Bogorodskiy
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