Uploaded August 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
From bsdcan.org/events/bsdcan_2020/schedule/session/18-collapsing-the-virtualized-storage-stack-how-root-on-virtfs-can-eliminate-stacked-block-devices-in-virtual-environments
The authenticity of a virtual machine has always been a core tenet of virtualization but strict adherence to this 1974 rule laid out by Popek and Goldberg has led to unnecessarily-complex scenarios such as an OpenZFS ZVOL providing a block device to VMFS over iSCSI, which in turn provides a second block device to a virtual machine running XFS. At best, the added block devices in this scenario provide some notion of isolation of the VM from the host but at worse, this "stacking" can result in paralyzing write amplification and unnecessarily-complex data recovery procedures.
This talk will demonstrate how "root on VirtFS" can eliminate this unnecessary complexity using the bhyve virtual machine manager and OpenZFS.
From bsdcan.org/events/bsdcan_2020/schedule/session/18-collapsing-the-virtualized-storage-stack-how-root-on-virtfs-can-eliminate-stacked-block-devices-in-virtual-environments
The authenticity of a virtual machine has always been a core tenet of virtualization but strict adherence to this 1974 rule laid out by Popek and Goldberg has led to unnecessarily-complex scenarios such as an OpenZFS ZVOL providing a block device to VMFS over iSCSI, which in turn provides a second block device to a virtual machine running XFS. At best, the added block devices in this scenario provide some notion of isolation of the VM from the host but at worse, this "stacking" can result in paralyzing write amplification and unnecessarily-complex data recovery procedures.
This talk will demonstrate how "root on VirtFS" can eliminate this unnecessary complexity using the bhyve virtual machine manager and OpenZFS.
