From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Apr 24 14:53:24 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from fw.wintelcom.net (ns1.wintelcom.net [209.1.153.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 616A437B423 for ; Tue, 24 Apr 2001 14:53:21 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bright@fw.wintelcom.net) Received: (from bright@localhost) by fw.wintelcom.net (8.10.0/8.10.0) id f3OLrI616923; Tue, 24 Apr 2001 14:53:18 -0700 (PDT) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 14:53:18 -0700 From: Alfred Perlstein To: Andrew Gallatin Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: vmware on freebsd for fast booting for devel. Message-ID: <20010424145318.Z1790@fw.wintelcom.net> References: <20010424130546.V1790@fw.wintelcom.net> <15077.62336.317751.756087@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <15077.62336.317751.756087@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>; from gallatin@cs.duke.edu on Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 05:43:28PM -0400 X-all-your-base: are belong to us. Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG * Andrew Gallatin [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. > 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? :) -- -Alfred Perlstein - [alfred@freebsd.org] Instead of asking why a piece of software is using "1970s technology," start asking why software is ignoring 30 years of accumulated wisdom. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message