On Sun, 9 Apr 2006 19:50:14 -0700 (PDT), Ed Wensell III
<ewensell3@yahoo.com> wrote:

> --- "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
> > Hmm -- can that handle the partition I have NetBSD in now?
> > 
> 
> As far as I can tell, no. VMware uses a disk image file similar to Qemu or
> Bochs. As far as I know, there is no way to tell it to directly utilize a
> filesystem on a disk device (at least in the free VMware Player version).
> 
> Also, VMware Player provides a mostly [completely??] virtualized
> environment, again similar to what Bochs and Qemu does. VMware Player is
> more like Qemu, in that there is very little emulation of the CPU,
> therefore the virtual environment runs at near native speed of the host
> system. 
> 
> So, if your goal is to test NetBSD under a laptop environment, then VMware
> Player is probably not the route to go. Chances are it would "see" a
> virtualized desktop system rather than the native devices of the laptop.
> 
> You probably want to look at Xen.
> 
I'd love to run Xen, if only I could have dom0 on Windows.

I run NetBSD native on my laptop; I have for years.  The problem is that
NetBSD isn't very good at certain things, and I'm always exploring other
options.

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb