On 01/22/2013 10:19 AM, Chuck Munro wrote:
> Ooops!  the SL listserv didn't like my response, so I'm re-sending.  
> My apologies if you see a duplicate :-)
>
> On 01/22/2013 03:12 AM, David Sommerseth wrote:
>>
>> Depending on the BSD flavour, of course, but FreeBSD 8.2+ and 9 have
>> virtio support ...
>>
>> <http://www.area536.com/projects/freebsd-as-a-kvm-guest-using-virtio/>
>> <http://people.freebsd.org/~kuriyama/virtio/>
>>
>> I believe there are some ongoing work for virtio support in both OpenBSD
>> and NetBSD as well.  But that's also all I know.
>>
>> -- 
>> kind regards,
>>
>> David Sommerseth
>>
>
> Many thanks for the info, David.  Very useful.
>
> As it happens, I'm testing with multiple instances of m0n0wall, which is
> based on FreeBSD v6.  I also have an instance of pfSense 2.0.2, which is
> based on FreeBSD 8.1, so I guess I'm out of luck until m0n0wall moves to
> v8.3 (in beta) and pfSense moves to v9 with rev.2.1.  That explains the
> problem with Virtio.
>
> Meanwhile, I tested an instance of Linux-based IPCop, which did use a
> Virtio disk, but still had the problem of writes once per second.  It's
> as if libvirtd does a sync every second, and there's some sort of data
> being written each time.  Very strange.  I just discovered the
> linux-kvm.org forum, so I probably should post my question there.
>
> Chuck

The 'atime' suite of mount options has sometimes manifested this 
behavior on my systems.

I'd check and make sure you've got those set correctly (off).

Perhaps the constant writing is to update these access times.... perhaps 
not.  You're right, the linux-kvm folks seem like the right audience.

Pat



-- 
Pat Riehecky
Scientific Linux Developer