VMWare3 on FreeBSD 4.11 and 5.4

[Per Hedeland]

A couple more data points, both from vmware3 on 5.3-RELEASE:


System 1.

linux_base-8-8.0_4
vmware3-3.2.1.2242_10,1

- both cvsup'ed up-to-date at the time of installation (Jan 6 2005).

Kernel has 'device apic' (but not SMP - it's a single PIII).
VMware lives entirely in /usr/local.

Runs OKish including networking, but pretty light usage and only Win98
as guest. I do get the bogus kern.hz warning, and I wouldn't call what
happens at shutdown a "panic", but it does throw up a popup:

  VMware Workstation Unrecoverable error: (VMX)
  AIO: NOT_IMPLEMENTED F(831):712
  Please request support and include the contents of the log file:
  '/home/per/vmware/win98/vmware.log'.

- I just ignore both.:-) OK, there is some noise about "panic" in the
mentioned log, but the guest OS is always shut down properly.


System 2.

linux_base-7.1_7
vmware3-3.2.1.2242_9,1

Kernel has neither 'device apic' nor SMP (it's a P4 capable of HT, but I
had other problems with SMP anyway).
VMware lives entirely in /usr/local.

On this system VMware would absolutely not run with 'device apic' nor
linux_base-8 (same vintage as above). I resorted to the ports skeleton
from the release CD and turned off cvsup to keep my sanity. With 'device
apic' my mouse went catatonic, and the CPU user/sys/idle timers simply
stopped, when I started VMware. With linux-base-8, VMware could be run
as root, but trying to run it as an ordinary user resulted in immediate
segfault.

However with the above setup it runs perfectly, heavy daily use with
both WinXP and RH7.3 as guests, simultaneously (in different VMware
instances:-), including a lot of network use. I basically never startup
or shutdown (they run under Xvnc), but that works fine too as far as I
recall.


--Per Hedeland