Experiences with 7.0-CURRENT and vmware.

Thu May 10 19:21:21 UTC 2007

On Thursday, 10 May 2007 at 12:54:45 +0000, Darren Reed wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 01:28:16PM +0100, Robert Watson wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, 10 May 2007, Darren Reed wrote:
> > 
> > >I'm using FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT under vmware and there are a few issues.
> 
> Redirecting to current at ...
> 
> > >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?
> > 
> > Have you tried hint.acpi.0.disabled=1 instead?  This is what appears in 
> > acpi(4), and is what is used in various existing boot loader bits when I 
> > grep around.
> 
> In another reply it was "hint.apic.0.disabled=1".
> My current loader.conf:
> 
> vm.kmem_size=536870912
> vm.kmem_size_max=536870912
> unset acpi_load
> hint.acpi.0.disabled=1
> hint.apci.0.disabled=1
> hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"
> hint.apci.0.disabled="1"
> vfs.zfs.arc_max=402653184
> 
> Booting with this gives me:
>  kernel: Timecounter "ACPI-safe" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 1000
> 
> and ACPI enabled.
> 
> > >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?
> > 
> > kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-fast
> > kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) ACPI-fast(1000) i8254(0) dummy(-1000000)
> > 
> > I believe you can simply set kern.timecounter.hardware=APCI-fast and it 
> > will do what you expect.  An interesting question is why it selects what is 
> > arguably the wrong one; a post to current@ might help resolve that.
> 
> Hmm.
> 
> # sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware="ACPI-fast"
> kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-safe
> sysctl: kern.timecounter.hardware: Invalid argument
> 
> Or is this a loader.conf setting?
> 
> > >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?
> > 
> > Has VMware changed what network hardware they emulate, and/or does VMware 
> > offer options about what virtual hardware to expose?
> 
> I don't believe so.  It still probes as pcn under NetBSD.
> 
> > The if_em driver is 
> > for Intel ethernet cards; historically VMware has exposed a Lance ethernet 
> > device supported by the lnc(4) device driver; now that driver has indeed 
> > been replaced with le(4).
> 
> Right.  I believe it still is lance, but somehow em is showing up.
> 
> > But if if_em is probing, it suggests a VMware 
> > change rather than a FreeBSD change, which you may be able to revert by 
> > telling it to expose a Lance-style device as opposed to an Intel device.
> 
> There's no way to choose the type of card vmware emulates.
>  
> > Generally speaking, this would be a discouraged configuration, but you will 
> > probably need to frob two settings: first, PermitEmptyPasswords in 
> > sshd_config, and second, force non-PAM validation by setting UsePAM to 
> > false. Instead of doing this, I would advise instead setting up an SSH key 
> > for the account, and not set a passphrase on the SSH key.  This doesn't 
> > require any changing of the global sshd configuration and should offer most 
> > of the same benefits.
> 
> btw, there are instances where you can be promopted 6 times for a
> password when logging in with ssh, 3 times with "Password:" prompt
> and another three with "root at hostname's password:" promopt.
> 
> Darren

This is on a 6 BETA install of VMware.  As you can see from below I'm using if_le.
This happened by default AFAIR.  Maybe I can check my config though to see if
there's a way to set the interface.  I don't get a chance to use this as much as
I'd like though so I can't claim to have much VMware knowledge.

FreeBSD beastie.dwlabs.ca 7.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT #2: Wed Mar 21 03:25:17 ADT 2007     duane at beastie.dwlabs.ca:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386

le0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
	options=8<VLAN_MTU>
	ether 00:0c:29:a4:2a:26
	inet 192.168.0.102 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
	media: Ethernet autoselect
	status: active
plip0: flags=108810<POINTOPOINT,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,NEEDSGIANT> metric 0 mtu 1500
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 16384
	inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x3 
	inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 
	inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 