On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 12:33:54AM -0400, Julian C. Dunn - Lists wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 19:16, Ambarish Malpani wrote:
> >     I have been running NetBSD on VMWare (on Win2K) for about 4 months now
> > and am very, very happy with it.
> 
> Just curious, what version of VMWare and NetBSD are you using? I had
> problems booting NetBSD 1.6.1 as a guest under VMWare Workstation 4.
> (The VMWare virtual IDE disk is not recognized by NetBSD, and if you use
> a virtual SCSI disk, NetBSD performs SCSI function calls which cause the
> virtual Buslogic driver to blow up, thereby crashing VMWare.)

Interesting - my experience is exactly the opposite, running various
versions of NetBSD, FreeBSD, Debian, RedHat (and I gave up on Solaris)
as guests on an XP host running VMware 4.  Of them all, NetBSD and
FreeBSD were the ones which handled the bha emulation the best. 

Debian refused to install until I used an emulated IDE disk.  RH9
failed to install properly until I used an emulated IDE disk, and
failed to boot properly until I got rid of the bha emulation
completely.  Solaris is a pain because it issues requests which blow
up the emulated CDROM in vmware 4.  In passing, RH9 is a real pain,
because I said that I wanted md5 passwords, but omitted to install the
software to read md5 passwords (and it let me), so now I can't log in.
Yet another installation for me.

> > 2. (I think), VMWare acts like I have a 10Mbps networking card, even though
> > I have a 100Mbps card. This slows down my file transfer speed more than it
> > needs to....
> 
> Have you verified this analytically, or are you just hypothesizing due
> to the fact that VMWare emulates an AMD PCNet card?

[10:26:21] agc@vm-netbsd ~ 4 > ifconfig -m pcn0
pcn0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        address: XX:XX:XX:55:e1:54
        media: Ethernet autoselect (autoselect)
        supported Ethernet media:
                media 10base5
                media 10base5 mediaopt full-duplex
                media 10baseT
                media 10baseT mediaopt full-duplex
                media autoselect
                media autoselect mediaopt full-duplex
        inet 10.4.0.23 netmask 0xff000000 broadcast 10.255.255.255
        inet6 fe80::20c:XXXX:fe55:e154%pcn0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
[10:26:35] agc@vm-netbsd ~ 5 >

As far as "analytically" goes, if you mean observing transfer speed,
then I haven't counted the bits personally, but ftp(1) typically gives
me figures like:

6660 KB   30.29 KB/s

over a wireless link on the host to a local machine.

Regards,
Alistair