Does someone knows why FreeBSD doesn't offer any virtualization platform based on Intel VT or AMD-v? Is there any architectural incompatibility or is it just a case of virtualization not being a high priority?
For FreeBSD, I think your choices for virtualization are limited to jails or Virtualbox. Virtualbox on FreeBSD does support Intel/AMD processor virtualization extensions I believe.
> They do however have fairly-powerful jails(not as powerful as LXC though)
To be honest, I grew up on BSD's, FreeBSD especially, and only later turned to Linux due high marked demand. In my projects, I've tried using LXC as the light (kernel) virtualization of choice, but I've found it extremely buggy, with a lot of security issues, implementation different in almost every flavor of Linux, documentation lacking... Not even close to maturity of Jails, to which I eventually turned back to. Dont get me wrong, I am still big fan of LXC and I can see it working in future, and having features I would like to see in Jails (they're getting there, especially recently) like fine grained resources control and restriction and so on, but as of today, it needs a lot of work in polishing and maturing the code.
> fairly-powerful jails(not as powerful as LXC though)
IMHO LXC wishes it were jails with vimage, and if you really wanted some hillarity you could actually run a linux container-like system under a jail using the linuxulator.
There are not a lot of options but VirtualBox works pretty excellently. There's also BHyVe and you can always use Qemu :)
The lack of hypervisor support is really more due to people not keeping up with the porting work. I would love to see Xen actively supported but I think BHyVe is going to be where the most work gets done.
BHyVe is FreeBSD's own hypervisor, and can run FreeBSD and Linux guests, but is not yet available in a release.
VirtualBox works well for end-user applications on current FreeBSD releases, and is being used by kernel developers in their workflow.