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Date:      Thu, 1 Feb 2001 09:13:25 -0800
From:      "Sam Leffler" <sam@errno.com>
To:        "Andrew Gallatin" <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>, <freebsd-emulation@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        <becker@cs.duke.edu>
Subject:   Re: experiences running vmware w/freebsd 5.0-current as guest
Message-ID:  <06d701c08c72$49a9d080$24a6d4d1@melange>
References:  <14968.51758.59870.15884@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Gallatin" <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>
To: <freebsd-emulation@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc: <becker@cs.duke.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 6:43 PM
Subject: experiences running vmware w/freebsd 5.0-current as guest


>
> Just a heads up so this makes it into the archives:
>
> When running FreeBSD-current as a guest in vmware (VMX86:
> version='unreleased' build='$Name: build-570 $' option=Release2.0.1) I
> ran into 2 problems:
>
> a) VMware crashes when the pcn driver probes the AMD PCInet card.
> This is indicated by a "NOT_IMPLEMENTED F(562):1654" message
> shortly after FreeBSD probes the PCI bus, right after
> message pci0: <display> at 15.0 (no driver attached).
>

This assertion is caused by the pcn driver doing 32-bit ins and outs to
16-bit registers (the upper 16 bits are reserved).

> Switching to a kernel without the pcn driver driver works around this.
> The lnc driver mostly still works, but is unable to correctly
> determine the card's mac address.  This doesn't seem to matter for
> running host-only networking.
>
> b) 5.0-current is _slow_.  Mounting root takes upwards of 30 seconds
> on a 400MHz mobile PII.  Going multi-user takes over 10 minutes.
> This is compared to near-native perf. with a 4.2-RELEASE kernel.
>
> Taking the i386 version of the atomic_cmpset_int() inline in
> sys/i386/include/atomic.h is an effective workaround for this.  Note
> that it is apparently not sufficient to build an I386_CPU kernel - I
> had trouble booting this.  Taking just the i386 version of
> atomic_cmpset_int() seems to work just fine, though.
>
> My theory is that the cmpxchgl instruction causes some sort of trap to
> software emulation, but I have not verified it.
>

It could be that the use of the cmpxchgl instruction is finding a slow path
through the runtime; if you have the code fragment handy I can forward it to
the appropriate VMware folks.

    Sam




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