On Jan 4, 2009, at 9:36 AM, Daniel A. Ramaley wrote:
Strangely enough, after asking my question, i reinstalled OpenBSD in VirtualBox with slightly different settings and now it is working just fine. I've managed to build a -stable release. I haven't tried running X, but just being able to compile is good enough for now. The settings i used that work on my machine are VirtualBox' defaults except for turning on VT-x/AMD-V, and within the VM i added softdep to the mount options in fstab.
Enabling the VT instructions is recommended regardless of what hypervisor is being used (at least, among the commercial ones). It will result in noticeably better performance overall. At least, this has been my experience with VMware and comments from Microsoft seem to indicate the same of Hyper-V and other hypervisors in general.
For those who don't follow VMware closely, ESXi (the VMware Infrastructure hypervisor) is now free. It comes with the VMware Infrastructure Client and the VMware Infrastructure Update utility. I would recommend it for anyone who is building a dedicated Virtualization Host. VMware Server is only necessary if you actually want to use the "host" OS and occasionally run guests. Of course, the hardware supported by ESXi is a little bit more limited, since it's geared for server platform hardware. You'll want to make sure the BIOS and firmware for all the underlying gadgets has been upgraded to the latest (RAID controllers, etc).
-- bk
