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Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 14:46:01 +1000 (EST)
From: Andy Farkas <andyf@speednet.com.au>
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To: james <jamesp@hisser.org>
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Subject: Re: FreeBSD in VMware?
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On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, james wrote:

> Does anyone have experience running FreeBSD under VMware? My host OS is WinXP
> SP1, running VMware 3.2.
>
> I'm trying to buildworld (5.0-CURRENT as of today) but the virtual machine just
> gets slower and slower. When I'm monitoring the stats using top, I notice that
> the CPU is spending ~50% of it's time in interrupt. If I Ctrl-C the procedure,
> the load goes down, but interrupt % stays around 20-25% and the system is still
> slow, even though it's not doing anything!

/sys/i386/conf/NOTES says:

# CPU_DISABLE_CMPXCHG disables the CMPXCHG instruction on > i386 IA32
# machines.  VmWare seems to emulate this instruction poorly, causing
# the guest OS to run very slowly.

So, you'll need to rebuild a new kernel on another system with:

options         CPU_DISABLE_CMPXCHG

and copy it into the virtual machine in order to boot normally.

--

 :{ andyf@speednet.com.au

        Andy Farkas
    System Administrator
   Speednet Communications
 http://www.speednet.com.au/