Use of Floppy Drive with FreeBSD Virtual Machines

[Abhishek Gupta (LIS)]

Thanks for the response Michael! I understand now. Just wanted to let you know that Hyper-V Gen2 VMs do not have a virtual FDD. Not that we have FreeBSD supported on it yet but the scenarios you describe may not work on Gen2 FreeBSD virtual machines today. Thanks again for the feedback.

Abhishek

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Dexter [mailto:editor at callfortesting.org] 
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 10:13 PM
To: Abhishek Gupta (LIS); freebsd-virtualization at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Use of Floppy Drive with FreeBSD Virtual Machines


Hello Abhishek,

On 11/11/13 11:37 AM, Abhishek Gupta (LIS) wrote:
> Thanks so much for replying. Some follow up questions:
> 
> a) Is it not possible to use an ISO file to do the BIOS updates?

I have not.

> b) I did not quite understand your second comment on why PCI pass 
> through may promote floppy disk use. Please could you elaborate a bit 
> more?

The scenario I see the most is a virtualized (HyperV, VMware etc.) FreeNAS guest to which you pass a PCIe storage controller card to so that ZFS is given "bare metal" access to hardware disks yet has the benefit of the fast internal backplane if you will for networking, rather than going over copper or optical network interfaces.

Because the FreeNAS guest may be one among many, it would not be desirable to reboot the whole system and boot to a floppy to apply a BIOS update to a PCIe controller card. Again, I have not tried anything like this but it is a possible use case of what you describe. Also mind you I never want to see another floppy-based BIOS again but they are still out there.

Michael