Freenas Virtio Drivers

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeNAS 8.3.1-BETA3. This is the last planned public beta of 8.3.1 as it moves towards the final. FreeNAS 8.3.1-BETA3 can be downloaded from the following location: FreeNAS 8.3.1 adds ZFS volume encryption to the features available in FreeNAS 8.3.0. BETA3 has a number of bug fixes and feature requests based on community feedback and testing of the first two beta releases, as well as feedback and bug fixes from FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE-p1. There are no further betas planned as FreeNAS 8.3.1 marches towards the final release. At this point there will be no additional features added to 8.3.1. Virtio drivers have been added to the image.

Virtio binary packages for FreeBSD. KVM and VirtualBox (and BHyVe?) support virtio, and we finally have virtio drivers in base tree. These virtualization technologies are sometimes used in resource restricted VPS and IaaS environments.

A mouthful of briny wonderful-ness! Prezentaciya na temu neobichnie doma na anglijskom yazike.

For this BETA they default to off, which makes them a bit difficult to use.

I'm trying to run either FreeNAS 8.0.4 or NAS4Free 9 as a KVM guest on my Ubuntu 12.04 (server) but the network connection is unusably slow in either guest OS (when testing with rsync for example the connection starts off normal, at around 100MB/s, but then quickly fluctuates to 2MB/s tops). With NAS4Free I can use the e1000 (which doesn't work with FreeNAS) but it doesn't make any difference.

Bridge networking is setup on the host and I've also tested the hard drive read write speeds within the host to make sure that wasn't where the bottleneck was coming from. I'm thinking that installing the VirtIO drivers may fix the problem, assuming there isn't some network setting I could have messed up on the host which is causing this? However, I can't seem to figure out how to install VirtIO on either FreeNAS or NAS4Free.

Since NAS4Free is based on FreeBSD 9 I started with this but even though NAS4Free is based on FreeBSD 9 it doesn't seem to be a full install? Thanks for your help!