Re: Supported VM environments under MacOS dom0

[Phil Pennock <netbsd-users+phil%spodhuis.org@localhost>]

On 2010-04-26 at 19:57 -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
>   If there's any interest in improving the portability of NetBSD to this
>   VM, what can I do to get more diagnostic information out of it and is
>   there anyone willing to work with me in getting it working?
> 
> You say this as if it's a conclusion that NetBSD is to blame, but in
> cases like this it's hard to tell.

I think you're reading intent into my words which was not there.  I
think that it's an iffy "platform" which is problematic to support --
the fact that the VM system cares more about the OS to run and what
hardware to provide than bare metal does is not a good sign.

My understanding has been that NetBSD always works to try to run on such
platforms anyway and I'm willing to do what I can to help, as time
allows.

> I use VMware Fusion and it's worked fine.
> 
>   I don't
>   have spare hardware to install NetBSD on the metal, so can't build
>   bootable images myself, but I should be able to set up PXE boot if
>   producing minimal ISOs is a hassle.
> 
> Sure you can - build.sh will build a bootable iso image from sources
> under a mac with no problems.  I've done it and installed from the
> resulting image in vmware.

Oh, didn't realise the legendary cross-compilation of NetBSD extended to
building on such divergent build-host OSes.  Good to know, thanks.


I'll try a { boot -1 } in the VM when I get home tonight (personal
laptop).  I'm only granting a single CPU, so uniprocessor kernel options
should be fine.  If that fails, I'll try VirtualBox.


I was hoping that there was some sort of remote kernel debugger I could
use to interrupt things, so if I figure out how to plumb up the serial
port provided to the VM to a dom0 driver I might invoke gdb on it or
something.  Any pointers?

If I get NetBSD booted, would it be useful to capture the output from
acpidump(8) and what would be the appropriate list / bug-tracker to use
to chase this down further, or is there a no interest given that other
VM systems are reported to work?

Thanks,
-Phil