Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 18:00:23 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> To: Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: vmware on freebsd for fast booting for devel. Message-ID: <15077.63351.26014.849385@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> In-Reply-To: <20010424145318.Z1790@fw.wintelcom.net> References: <20010424130546.V1790@fw.wintelcom.net> <15077.62336.317751.756087@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> <20010424145318.Z1790@fw.wintelcom.net>
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Alfred Perlstein writes: > * Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> [010424 14:44] wrote: > > > > 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? > > I acutally haven't tried vmware yet, I was hoping to utilize the > lists to find out others' experiences wrt using vmware like I > wish to. Ah.. the "2 minutes" above made it sound like you were already using it. If you do start to use it (running -current as a guest), make sure to use the i386 path for atomic_cmpset_int() unconditionally -- somehow the cmpxchgl is finding a very slow path through the emulator. > > 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. > > Yeah, where do i buy one? Heh. Most Dell i810 based Optiplexes boot quickly. You just need to throw an fxp in there for pxe. I'm sure other, cheaper, boxes do just as well. Compared to the full-price vmware, it would probably be quicker to buy a used p6.. 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
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