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Date:      Tue, 24 Apr 2001 14:53:18 -0700
From:      Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
To:        Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: vmware on freebsd for fast booting for devel.
Message-ID:  <20010424145318.Z1790@fw.wintelcom.net>
In-Reply-To: <15077.62336.317751.756087@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>; from gallatin@cs.duke.edu on Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 05:43:28PM -0400
References:  <20010424130546.V1790@fw.wintelcom.net> <15077.62336.317751.756087@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>

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* Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> [010424 14:44] wrote:
> 
> 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?  

I acutally haven't tried vmware yet, I was hoping to utilize the
lists to find out others' experiences wrt using vmware like I
wish to.

> 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.

Yeah, where do i buy one?

:)

-- 
-Alfred Perlstein - [alfred@freebsd.org]
Instead of asking why a piece of software is using "1970s technology,"
start asking why software is ignoring 30 years of accumulated wisdom.

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