From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Apr 24 19: 3:45 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from ambrisko.com (adsl-216-103-208-74.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net [216.103.208.74]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3FC6937B422 for ; Tue, 24 Apr 2001 19:03:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ambrisko@ambrisko.com) Received: (from ambrisko@localhost) by ambrisko.com (8.11.3/8.11.2) id f3P22xw25939; Tue, 24 Apr 2001 19:02:59 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ambrisko) From: Doug Ambrisko Message-Id: <200104250202.f3P22xw25939@ambrisko.com> Subject: Re: vmware on freebsd for fast booting for devel. In-Reply-To: <15077.62336.317751.756087@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> "from Andrew Gallatin at Apr 24, 2001 05:43:28 pm" To: Andrew Gallatin Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 19:02:59 -0700 (PDT) Cc: Alfred Perlstein , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL82 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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