Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 19:02:59 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug Ambrisko <ambrisko@ambrisko.com> To: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> Cc: Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: vmware on freebsd for fast booting for devel. Message-ID: <200104250202.f3P22xw25939@ambrisko.com> In-Reply-To: <15077.62336.317751.756087@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> "from Andrew Gallatin at Apr 24, 2001 05:43:28 pm"
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Andrew Gallatin writes: | | 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. Why not just use EtherBoot? /usr/ports/net/etherboot It's supports the AMD chip and works with vmware. Use Julian nullmodem driver and connect up a serial console & kgdb session and you are all set. Blow kernel chunks and just reset vmware and away you go. I NFS mount the root filesystem. Actually what I do since sometimes I work on drivers is netboot a slow lunch box machine of my laptop and if it dies just press reset and netboot it again. I build the kernels on the laptop. Another feature of Etherboot is the built in menu capability so you can select from a list of kernels. BTW grub uses parts of Etherboot for their netbooting. Ironically Etherboot started from FreeBSD's netboot to boot Linux and then I added FreeBSD back in. If you want to try an Etherboot floppy image try http://rom-o-matic.net/ Just remember to go into Configure and enable IMAGE_FREEBSD & ELF_IMAGE You can select serial, vga or both consoles. Then point vmware at the floppy image and boot. Doug A. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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