From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Apr 24 14:44: 5 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from duke.cs.duke.edu (duke.cs.duke.edu [152.3.140.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6CB1D37B422 for ; Tue, 24 Apr 2001 14:44:01 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) Received: from grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (grasshopper.cs.duke.edu [152.3.145.30]) by duke.cs.duke.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id RAA05893; Tue, 24 Apr 2001 17:43:58 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from gallatin@localhost) by grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (8.11.3/8.9.1) id f3OLhSa34636; Tue, 24 Apr 2001 17:43:28 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) From: Andrew Gallatin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15077.62336.317751.756087@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 17:43:28 -0400 (EDT) To: Alfred Perlstein Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: vmware on freebsd for fast booting for devel. In-Reply-To: <20010424130546.V1790@fw.wintelcom.net> References: <20010424130546.V1790@fw.wintelcom.net> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 12) "Channel Islands" XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Alfred Perlstein writes: > So I've got this really elite machinery here to test on, problem is that > booting takes about 2 minutes each time I make a bad kernel, soooo... Do you mean that vmware boots so slowly that the extra reboot cycle required to install the next test kernel is painfully slow? One thing to try to speedup vmware boots would be getting rid of the spinner in libstand -- vwware's dos-mode console i/o is painfully slow. The best way to cut the reboot wait time down is to network boot. Unfortunately, VMware's AMD PCInet card doesn't support PXE. Somebody here has been using something called "grub" (http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/) Grub doesn't support FreeBSD very well (eg, it can't set the root device, set hints, etc). I think he was hacking grub to add those features, but I don't know how far he got...BTW, grub has no spinner. > Anyone using anything like vmware in order to have a rapid reboot/test > cycle for low level FreeBSD kernel coding? How fast is it to I've actually found real hardware to be much faster than vmware in most cases. My dream quick-reboot box has no scsi disks, can skip the memory test, has a serial console & loads its kernels via pxe. Drew ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andrew Gallatin, Sr Systems Programmer http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin Duke University Email: gallatin@cs.duke.edu Department of Computer Science Phone: (919) 660-6590 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message