Andrew Gallatin writes:
|
| 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?
|
| 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.
Why not just use EtherBoot?
/usr/ports/net/etherboot
It's supports the AMD chip and works with vmware. Use Julian
nullmodem driver and connect up a serial console & kgdb session
and you are all set. Blow kernel chunks and just reset vmware and
away you go. I NFS mount the root filesystem.
Actually what I do since sometimes I work on drivers is netboot a
slow lunch box machine of my laptop and if it dies just press
reset and netboot it again. I build the kernels on the laptop.
Another feature of Etherboot is the built in menu capability so you
can select from a list of kernels.
BTW grub uses parts of Etherboot for their netbooting. Ironically
Etherboot started from FreeBSD's netboot to boot Linux and then
I added FreeBSD back in.
If you want to try an Etherboot floppy image try
http://rom-o-matic.net/
Just remember to go into Configure and enable
IMAGE_FREEBSD & ELF_IMAGE
You can select serial, vga or both consoles. Then point vmware at the
floppy image and boot.
Doug A.
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