optimal kernel options for VMWARE guest system

John Nielsen lists at jnielsen.net
Tue Oct 3 13:06:20 PDT 2006


On Tuesday 03 October 2006 12:58, Jeff Dickens wrote:
> I have some Freebsd systems that are running as VMware guests.  I'd like
> to configure their kernels so as to minimize the overhead on the VMware
> host system.  After reading and partially digesting the white paper on
> timekeeping in VMware virtual machines
> (http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf) it appears that I
> might want to make some changes.
>
> Has anyone addressed this issue?

I haven't read the white paper (yet; thanks for the link), but I've had good 
results with recent -STABLE VM's running under ESX server 3. Some thoughts:

As I do on most of my installs, I trimmed down GENERIC to include just the 
drivers I use. In this case that was mpt for the disk and le for the network 
(although I suspect forcing the VM to present e1000 hardware and then using 
the em driver would work as well if not better).

The VMware tools package that comes with ESX server does a poor job of getting 
itself to run, but it can be made to work without too much difficulty. Don't 
use the port, run the included install script to install the files, ignore 
the custom network driver and compile the memory management module from 
source (included). If using X.org, use the built-in vmware display driver, 
and copy the vmmouse driver .o file from the VMware tools dist to the 
appropriate dir under /usr/X11. Even though the included file is for X.org 
6.8, it works fine with 6.9/7.0 (X.org 7.1 should include the vmmouse 
driver.) Run the VMware tools config script from a non-X terminal (and you 
can ignore the warning about running it remotely if you're using SSH), so it 
won't mess with your X display (it doesn't do anything not accomplished 
above). Then run the rc.d script to start the VMware tools.

I haven't noticed any timekeeping issues so far.

JN


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