How to make a FreeBSD vm in virtualbox.

[Adrian Chadd]

On 31 December 2014 at 10:15, Allan Jude <allanjude at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 2014-12-31 13:06, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
>> 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
>>
>
> I was going to say, I thought a .ova file was just a .tar of the .vmdk
> and a .xml config file
>
> It doesn't seem like virtualbox would be required if the .xml file was
> generated and then checked into the tree


Course not, but then you have two problems - .xml and "no tool to
generate / modify the config programatically."




-adrian