How to make a FreeBSD vm in virtualbox.

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 03:17:23PM +0000, Glen Barber wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 10:04:38PM -0800, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> > 
> > On Dec 30, 2014, at 8:24 PM, Glen Barber wrote:
> > 
> > > On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 07:42:36PM -0800, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> > >> After he linked it to me, I decided that it would make sense if
> > >> this was scripted and would really make sense as part of the release
> > >> process.
> > >> 
> > > 
> > > We already provide VMDK images.  There is nothing, that I can see, that
> > > is different from how I've been testing the various images.  Creating
> > > a new VM and attaching the VMDK to the disk controller is the intended
> > > workflow.
> > 
> > The difference is that with a vmdk you must get the exact
> > combinations of items correct or you will wind up with a FreeBSD
> > instance that will not boot.  With the ova, you just run a single
> > command "VBoxManage FreeBSD.ova" and stuff "just works", or you can
> > even just double click on the downloaded file from within your OS
> > X / Windows/ whatever host and it "just works".
> > 
> > 
> > > 
> > >> I've written a script that will make a .ova that you can one-click
> > >> import into Virtualbox (and I think Fusion as well) here:
> > >> 
> > >>  https://gist.github.com/splbio/84bd4d2122782e99fc5c
> > >> 
> > > 
> > > Can you send the script as an attachment?
> > 
> > Uh sure.  It's attached.
> > 
> 
> Your script relies on VirtualBox being installed on the build machine,
> which I do not like.  This is one of the major reasons I'm happy Marcel
> added VMDK support to mkimg(1) - all the components to create the
> formatted disk image exist in the base system.
> 

Long ago I had created the quick and really dirty:
https://people.freebsd.org/~bapt/vmdkimage-srcs/

This created ova files ready to be used in virtualbox (I had problem with vmware
I don't remember why)

basically an ova file is a tar file in a given order with a template
(FreeBSD.ovf) and a manifest with checksums)

This is really easy to produce and I agree it would be nice if we could produce
one.

The matter for having something that worked both in vbox and vmware was playing
with the disk controler.

What I did back in the time was generating an ova from vbox extracting the .ovf
reducing to the minimum required the final ovf and ask people to import in in
vmware (I do not have access to any vmware)

Now that we have mkimg that should be rather easy to create an ova generator at
least for virtualbox (vmware compatible might be more tricky)

The interesting part is that the ova format is normalized and used by lots of
the virtualisation tools out there

Best regards,
Bapt
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