Vmware3 + FreeBSD 5.3 or 4.11

[Per Hedeland]

Simon Žekar <simon.zekar at literal.si> wrote:
>
>I'm wondering, does anyone have a working and relatively stable 
>configuration running vmware3 on FreeBSD 5.3 or maybe 4.11 ? I'm unable 
>set it up on both versions, but it worked great on 4.9.

Well, I have two 5.3-RELEASE boxes running vmware3 acceptably stable,
though with some "issues":

Box 1 required that I built a kernel w/o 'device apic' - with apic in,
my box didn't quite freeze, but my mouse became unusable and the cpu
usage counters stopped running - giving vmstat output like:

 procs      memory      page                    disks     faults      cpu
 r b w     avm    fre  flt  re  pi  po  fr  sr ad4 cd0   in   sy  cs us sy id
 ...
 2 1 0  444208 791176    1   0   0   0   2   0  28   0  244  937 548  0  0  0

Furthermore, when built from an up-to-date ports tree (i.e. using
linux_base-8) as of three weeks ago, it would segfault immediately on
startup if run by a normal user, while it worked fine for root. I backed
down to the ports tree that came with 5.3-RELEASE, and built from that
it now works perfectly fine.

Box 2 had neither of those problems, i.e. vmware3 works with device apic
in the kernel and built from an up-to-date (as of three weeks ago) ports
three - however (only) on exit from vmware I get a complaint about aio:

VMware Workstation Unrecoverable error: (VMX)
AIO: NOT_IMPLEMENTED F(831):712
Please request support and include the contents of the log file: ...

Since it doesn't seem to affect operations, I've just ignored it - I
don't run vmware much on this box though, so it's possible that there
are nasty problems lurking there, and I just haven't seen them...

--Per Hedeland