Hi, On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 10:42 AM, Tom Ehlert <t...@drivesnapshot.de> wrote: > >>> I'm building the new website. I'll update the notice to encourage new >>> users to install FreeDOS in a virtual machine. >> >> any reason why we don't provide ready to run virtual machines as .VHD >> images? > >> Hmm... I don't know why we haven't. I don't know anything about VHD >> though. Is that a standard virtual disk image that any PC >> emulator/virtual machine can read? Can free/open source software >> virtual machines read these (or create them)? > > .VHD is a fairly generic virtual *disk* format, and most virtual > machines providers should be able to read them. > > a tiny bit more specialized are the virtual machine configuration > files, but we should be able to provide multiple formats, for Virtual > Box, DosBox, HyperV, ... > > still no rocket science, and no risk to damage user data.
There's nothing wrong with providing a public .VMDK (etc.), but it's probably a lot of work to maintain one (make sure it has all useful tools and compilers in recent versions, make sure it satisfies all licenses, make sure it's not overly large). I just assume we didn't have enough people interested in making one. The end user can always install manually (from .iso) to whatever format / emulator they want. Do they really need us to hold their hand? (Probably yes, but it's a ton more effort on our part.) Anyways, according to FreeBSD ( ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/VM-IMAGES/README.txt ), these are some disk image formats: vhd: VirtualPC, Hyper-V, Xen, VirtualBox vmdk: VMWare qcow2: Qemu, KVM, VirtualBox raw: bhyve, other hypervisors that support unformatted raw disk image Actually, I think .VMDK (at least older version) is supported via "qemu-img" and thus QEMU itself nowadays. They also support VirtualBox's .VDI (somewhat). Besides, there's also the existence of .VHDX and .OVA. I dunno, it's a mess, it's a crapshoot, some things may or may not be "well-supported" under all emulators / hypervisors. Honestly, I recommend .VMDK, but I've only had limited interaction with it, so I don't know if that's truly the best format. (Obviously some demand "raw" format, but "qemu-img" can "convert" between several formats, IIRC.) Just for comparison, FreeBSD 10.3 (i386) distributes in several formats ( ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/VM-IMAGES/10.3-RELEASE/i386/Latest/ ): .qcow2.xz, raw.xz, vhd.xz, vmdk.xz (Although I personally think that's a duplication of effort unless you are absolutely sure that all targeted emulators can't reliably handle a single format. But I'm not aware of various advantages or disadvantages either, so who knows.) P.S. No, I've never used bhyve, and I have no idea if it (now?) has BIOS + DOS support. AFAIK, no. (See https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve .) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What NetFlow Analyzer can do for you? Monitors network bandwidth and traffic patterns at an interface-level. Reveals which users, apps, and protocols are consuming the most bandwidth. Provides multi-vendor support for NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow and other flows. Make informed decisions using capacity planning reports. http://sdm.link/zohomanageengine _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
