From owner-freebsd-emulation Thu Mar 30 15:15:34 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Received: from guardian.sftw.com (guardian.sftw.com [209.157.37.25]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 475A537B9CB for ; Thu, 30 Mar 2000 15:15:31 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from nsayer@sftw.com) Received: from yoda.sftw.com (yoda.sftw.com [209.157.37.211]) by guardian.sftw.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA82810 for ; Thu, 30 Mar 2000 15:15:30 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from nsayer@sftw.com) Received: from sftw.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by yoda.sftw.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA00993 for ; Thu, 30 Mar 2000 15:15:30 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from nsayer@sftw.com) Message-ID: <38E3E010.BA16A153@sftw.com> Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 15:15:28 -0800 From: Nick Sayer Reply-To: nsayer@freebsd.org X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.12 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Subject: More on vmware plain disks Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-emulation@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-emulation" in the body of the message