Call for Testers: VirtualBox 4.0.6

[Jung-uk Kim]

On Friday 22 April 2011 07:01 am, Bernhard Froehlich wrote:
> It's about two months since the last call for testers and a lot of
> bugfixing has happened since then. Not all of the reported problems
> were FreeBSD related which is a good indication that we're not too
> far behind the stability of the other hosts. So let's get it one
> once again.
>
> Last time I asked for some help and Baptiste Daroussin (bapt@) made
> the classic mistake to respond. So all please welcome bapt to the
> FreeBSD Vbox Team!
>
> This is also the first time that we provide FreeBSD binary
> packages. They are build for FreeBSD 7.4 and 8.2 on i386 and amd64
> platform and have the DEBUG option enabled. If you use a STABLE
> kernel you can use the virtualbox-ose-4.0.6-*-RELEASE-*.tbz binary
> package but have to compile the kernel module port for your kernel
> yourself.
> (emulators/virtualbox-ose-kmod)

For very long time, I had a serious performance/timer issues with 
VirtualBox where TSC is not constant and timecounter hardware is not 
TSC.  Today, I finally found a workaround (please see the attached 
patch).  With this patch, TSC frequency is quite reasonable now.  
Basically, we were using nano(up)time(9) and they were too expensive 
for VirtualBox timekeeping.  I believe it is okay to use 
getnano(up)time(9) here because a) VirtualBox already assumes these 
calls do not return accurate time (unless high-res timer is 
available, i.e., Linux) and b) we already report timer granularity is 
equal to kern.hz via RTTimerGetSystemGranularity().  Any thoughts?

Thanks for your hard work!

Jung-uk Kim
-------------- next part --------------
--- src/VBox/Runtime/r0drv/freebsd/time-r0drv-freebsd.c.orig	2011-04-21 06:31:45.000000000 -0400
+++ src/VBox/Runtime/r0drv/freebsd/time-r0drv-freebsd.c	2011-04-29 18:57:26.000000000 -0400
@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@
 RTDECL(uint64_t) RTTimeNanoTS(void)
 {
     struct timespec tsp;
-    nanouptime(&tsp);
+    getnanouptime(&tsp);
     return tsp.tv_sec * UINT64_C(1000000000)
          + tsp.tv_nsec;
 }
@@ -68,6 +68,6 @@ RTDECL(uint64_t) RTTimeSystemMilliTS(voi
 RTDECL(PRTTIMESPEC) RTTimeNow(PRTTIMESPEC pTime)
 {
     struct timespec tsp;
-    nanotime(&tsp);
+    getnanotime(&tsp);
     return RTTimeSpecSetTimespec(pTime, &tsp);
 }