Experiences with 7.0-CURRENT and vmware.

[Dominic Marks]

Darren Reed wrote:
>
> 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?

Does:

hint.apic.0.disabled=1

Help?

> 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 :-/

Use a password-free (R|D)SA key.

Dominic