Booting in a VM tip

If you’re trying DragonFly 3 in a virtual machine, you may have noticed some issues in booting in (for instance) Qemu.  Sepherosa Ziehau committed a change that sets the sysctl hw.ioapic_enable to 0 in virtual environments.  It can always be turned back on, but the recent MSI/MSI-X improvements seem to cause trouble in some virtual environment.  You can also set that tunable at boot to get an initial install going.

(I haven’t had trouble in Virtualbox or VMWare, so you may or may not need this.)

5 Replies to “Booting in a VM tip”

  1. Cheered!
    QEMU for 3.0 is a laser from usb devices. almost RT benchmarking. the bootloader has it’s things for different bioses. not tested on hwvirt so far just virtualized enviroment using only 378Mb for a lightweight but complex Python application server.
    Has anyone done PHP benckmarks on 3.0 ?

  2. OK so I was trying to use DFBSD, and frankly that’s all I did – trying, because I couldn’t get a graphical desktop running.
    the site’s handbook is totally out dated – no D.E. could be downloaded and installed (KDE, Xfce, Gnome…)
    this is not a complaint, I thought maybe I would let you know about this so you might just maybe, maybe, maybe Fix it….

  3. newt – have you tried, for instance, cd /usr/pkgsrc/meta-pkgs/xfce4; bmake install?

    Larger desktop environments have a lot of dependencies, so having just 1 package not build can mean no binaries. XFCE was complete, I thought, and maybe Gnome

  4. I haven’t tried that cause I’m new to bsd, and couldn’t find anywhere such method. even on other bsd distros. I’ve tried pkg_search xfce(4) but couldn’t find anything that works.
    thanks for the tip I’ll try it soon.
    I want to add that IMO attracting new users to DFBSD should be in high priority, because when people exposed to this OS it could be their first step in becoming contributors.
    I know that you’re not a lot of guys working on DFBSD and it’s hard for you to maintain it, you definitely deserve credit for what you do, but from a new user perspective please try to keep hand-book updated (or supply a prebuilt dfbsd with a decent D.E.)
    thanks for listening…

  5. To get graphical first you need probably to rebuild your kernel in case you are not downloading main Xorg packages and several times also needing *a driver* for instance to be built after the kernel or plain over a working Xorg.
    Getting Xorg to work is largely a fog sometimes you have to review the entire Xorg etc tree configurations and get a desired one, like the most minimalistic would be using XFCE4 you would need only reviewing a couple of files ~/.xinitrc or other instance of the startup script for the Xorg.
    DFBSD is beautifully compatable and mainline builds are somehow easy so it could take like a week of research before real application until you work out the whole Xorg process either selfmade or from the binaries. Look out for specific search terms you will find tentative information from non DFBSD that could assert your quest.
    Some other hardware are likely to be pretty incompatible so you would need going much more into the forum and socialize… good luck!

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