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Date:      Tue, 24 Apr 2001 17:43:28 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>
To:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: vmware on freebsd for fast booting for devel.
Message-ID:  <15077.62336.317751.756087@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20010424130546.V1790@fw.wintelcom.net>
References:  <20010424130546.V1790@fw.wintelcom.net>

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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.

 > Anyone using anything like vmware in order to have a rapid reboot/test
 > cycle for low level FreeBSD kernel coding?  How fast is it to

I've actually found real hardware to be much faster than vmware in
most cases. My dream quick-reboot box has no scsi disks, can skip the
memory test, has a serial console & loads its kernels via pxe.

Drew

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Gallatin, Sr Systems Programmer	http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin
Duke University				Email: gallatin@cs.duke.edu
Department of Computer Science		Phone: (919) 660-6590



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