4.8-Stable VMware performance

[Michael Nottebrock]

NOTE: Please CC me on answers, as I'm not subscribed to this mailing list, thanks!

The subject has probably been discussed many times, still I can't find
anything useful in the archives. I'm running a pretty recent FreeBSD
4.8-STABLE in VMware 4.0.1, with Windows 2000 being the host OS. I run FreeBSD
directly from a real partition, in order to save me a reboot once in a while.
The performance of the whole thing in the virtual machine however is
unsatisfying, especially if I compare it side-by-side with a Knoppix, also run
in the VMware. While in Knoppix KDE is pretty responsive and sound works fine,
FreeBSD becomes quite hogged as soon as XFree86 is up and running and sound is
very choppy with or without XFree86 running.

I have stumbled over the 5-only kernel option CPU_DISABLE_CMPXCHG, which is
said to help things, but the messages describing it date quite a while back.
Are there any known performance tweaks for FreeBSD 4 & VMware?

The host machine is a 2.4 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM.

NOTE: Please CC me on answers, as I'm not subscribed to this mailing list, thanks!
-- 
    ,_,   | Michael Nottebrock               | lofi at freebsd.org
  (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve     | http://www.freebsd.org
    \u/   | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org