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Date:      Thu, 30 Mar 2000 15:15:28 -0800
From:      Nick Sayer <nsayer@sftw.com>
To:        freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org
Subject:   More on vmware plain disks
Message-ID:  <38E3E010.BA16A153@sftw.com>

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So I have figured some more stuff out. Since I installed v2.0, I was
unable to use raw devices,
so I created a virtual win98 partition and let my nt partition lie
fallow, as it were. During that
time, I figured out that having the /tmp directory for vmware get backed
by tmpfs made for
frequent hangs and traps. So for a while now, my machine has been pretty
stable with vmware.
As soon as I figured out how to use a FreeBSD "slice" /dev entry in a
plain disk configuration,
I've started to see some mysterious hangs again. I have dd'ed the NT
partition out of its
device into a file and am using that with, I hope, more long term
success. If this configuration
crashes less, then I would have to conclude that there's something fishy
about pounding a
raw disk device (at least a /dev/rad0s? one) from a userland process.

In the meantime, I have found that plain disks have some advantages over
virtual ones. Not only
can you with reasonable ease transfer them back and forth from suitable
disks, you can also
use vnconfig to mount them if all you want to do in vmware is fetch a
single file. You can't do
that at all with a virtual disk. The sole advantage of a virtual disk is
that it can grow and shrink
with the guest filesystem's usage.





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