RE: NetBSD GUI practice and experience

["Terry Moore" <tmm%mcci.com@localhost>]

> From: tech-userlevel-owner%NetBSD.org@localhost [mailto:tech-userlevel-owner%NetBSD.org@localhost] On Behalf Of J. Lewis Muir
> 
> Running amd64 NetBSD 6 stable in a VMware Fusion VM on OS X, I needed
> 512 MB of RAM (with 512 MB of swap) in order to build the netbsd-6
> stable branch kernel and userland.  I initially tried 256 MB of RAM
> (with 256 MB of swap), but the kernel and userland build failed under
> this configuration.

Good points. 

I am using NetBSD for development, but not developing for NetBSD (except for internal tools). I don't do kernel or userland builds on this machine. My swap partition is 1 GiB (probably gross overkill, but it's much easier to change memory allocation in VMware than to adjust swap after building the VM.

A few more details: 

* I'm using 32-bit NetBSD 7 x86. 
* The VM configured as a uniprocessor. 
* I have two virtual disks, one for the OS, one for data. /dev/wd0a is using 4.7G out of 6.9G (it has /usr/pkgsrc and /usr/pkg, hence the size). /home is on /dev/wd1a. 
* I'm running the generic kernel.  
* I use Allegro NFS on the host (Windows 10) system, and also on other Windows guests. 
* I use NAT on the VMware network (rather than bridging the VMs to the outside Ethernet). 
* I run ntpd on the guest to keep the clock reasonably sane. 
* The VM happens to be a Version-9 compatible VM; I have am using VMware V12 but I have not upgraded the virtual machine.
* I do not use USB (that is, the VMware USB host-to-guest virtualization features) in the guest systems.

One awkward thing about VMware is that it doesn't coexist well with Hyper-V.  Hyper-V is pretty important for some Visual Studio workflows. Microsoft, to their credit, helped me solve this: I run a Win10 guest using the VMware "Hyper-V (unsupported)" option, and then run the Hyper-V guests inside the Win10 guest. Works well enough for my purposes, but I have a fast machine with 16G RAM. But on the host, you have to be somewhat vigilant when doing installs, because Visual Studio really wants to turn on Hyper-V as part of the install process.

--Terry