Four-Year FreeBSD bug closed, Virtualization Support Added

June 14, 2011 - PRLog -- It seems fitting that a website with the mission to solve people’s technology problems would share what it learns in supporting its user base.  For Experts Exchange system administrator Jason Helfman, that means an ongoing contribution to the FreeBSD community.

Last week, a new software port submitted by Helfman for libvirt was committed to the FreeBSD project (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/devel/libvirt/).
 
According to Jason, FreeBSD has virtualized portions of the operating system, but has learned from Bernhard Froehlic (who committed his latest port) there are still a few missing pieces.

“FreeBSD is currently catching up with virtualization support and virt-manager should give us support for managing VirtualBox, QEMU and Xen VMs on FreeBSD.  Work will need to continue on a virt-manager port,” Froehlic says.  
 
Fortunately for FreeBSD users, Jason is currently working on porting the virt-manager port to FreeBSD, which requires the newly added libvirt port.

“FreeBSD lets you interface with systems that are running other virtual machines.  The piece that’s missing on FreeBSD is the ability to have virtualization support,” Helfman explains. “This library will allow people to test out the changes they are making to the operating system, and it opens the gates for other things as well.”

Helfman’s work with libvirt is the latest in a series of contributions to the FreeBSD project. In 2009 he documented how to build your own FreeBSD Update Server (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/freeb...). For users that find it convenient to update their systems against an official update server, building their own FreeBSD Update Server may help to extend its functionality by supporting manually-tweaked FreeBSD releases or by providing a local mirror that will allow faster updates for a number of machines (the initial FreeBSD update-server-software was written by Colin Percival; Helfman worked with Percival to commit his work).  

Last April, working alongside Experts Exchange system administrator Phil Phillips, Helfman committed a patch to the FreeBSD project, closing a bug that had been open with FreeBSD since 2007. The patch was for postgreSQL database server ports and allowed a configurable user and group for running the database.
   
“Working with the FreeBSD project and having the opportunity to give back to the open source community is extremely rewarding,” Jason says.  “I plan to continue working on the project as long as the folks at FreeBSD will have me.”

For more information about Experts Exchange and FreeBSD, visit http://www.experts-exchange.com and http://www.freebsd.org.

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