Experiences with 7.0-CURRENT and vmware.

[Darren Reed]

I'm using FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT under vmware and there are a few issues.

First, time.
hint.hw.acpi.disabled="1"
This appears to make _no_ difference to time keeping on FreeBSD 7
and nor does it seem to have any impact on ACPI being loaded.  Do
I need to recompile a new kernel without it or is there a new way
to disable ACPI?

I should add that FreeBSD 6, with the same setting, is no better
and that I need to run ntpdate every 5-10 minutes via crontab in
order to keep good time (timekeeping is *really* bad.)  In one
instance, i was watching "zpool iostat 1" and it appeared like the
rows were muching up at a rate of 2 a second for a minute or so.
How do I disable TSC timekeeping?  (NetBSD has this disabled by
default in their kernels.)  Or is there somethign else I must do?

Second, networking.
Prior to FreeBSD-7, the driver to use inside vmware workstation
was lnc.  It has worked and contiues to work great.  No problemo.
FreeBSD-7 uses the "em" driver.  To put it simply, it sucks in
comparison.  When things really get bad I start seeing "em0: watchdog
timeout" messages on the console.  I looked and I don't see a lnc
driver anywhere.  Is there another alternative (le?) driver that
I can use in place of em, if so, how?

Apart from these two issues (which are very central ones :-(),
I'm using FreeBSD in a 64bit vmware workstation environment
quick successfully and ZFS is quite happy with all the kva :-)
ZFS and zpools are working just as I expect, even if a bit
slower due to vmware but I'm not cranking out benchmarks here.

Oh, and how do I fix ssh/rsh to do passwordless sessions?
I'm trying to setup cron jobs to automate various tasks but
there's this small hurdle called a password prompt that I
can't seem to get rid of :-/

Cheers,
Darren