Re: VMWare and GNU/HURD

[David Andrews <dba@duda.com>]

On Sun, 18 Jul 1999, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> 
> I tried to use VMware with rawdisk access to install the Hurd, but this
> didn't work because GRUB could only see a Disk Geometry error when feed
> with the 10 GB disk.

I didn't see this, but I only used virtual devices.  Oh, and I was using
GRUB 0.4.

> using cross-install and the packages. On a Pentium 100, this
> takes quite a while, vmware is a bit slow :)

VMWare is not a speed demon, that's for sure.  It's more of a dancing bear;
nobody cares how well the bear dances -- it's a wonder that it dances at all!

Here's an interesting, if crude statistic.  I measured the cpu utilization
(using top) of VMWare while the following virtual machines were sitting idle:

  MS-Windows 98 -- 22%
  Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 -- 0.5%
  gnu-19990104.tar.gz -- 57% (!)

I wouldn't know what was going on here.  Perhaps the clock pathlength is a
little overlong in Mach?  OKUJI?

> GNU Mach booted, and the Hurd came up. It did load all servers, etx2fs,
> exec, init, auth.
> 
> Then it just hung there. Maybe it just takes very long to proceed? What
> were your experiences?

I'm running on a 400MHz box with 128MB memory.  The HURD VM was
defined with 32MB of memory.  I have not told HURD about the swap partition
yet, and networking is not going.  (This is probably my fault -- I'm sort of
feeling my way around here.)

Booting from a GRUB floppy, it takes 25 seconds from the time I select "single
user" boot from hd0s1, to the time I get a HURD prompt.

I'm using your tarball named "gnu-19990104.tar.gz", so it isn't terribly
current.  Perhaps that is working to my advantage?

> What I like about VMware is the virtual network, really the only feature I
> could make use of, because I have only a single computer.

I finessed this by having a bootstrap OS with networking ability -- but I'll
have to have networking eventually.  I'd rather be more current first.

The obvious moral: nobody should go out and purchase VMWare based on my
small success.  In light of Marcus' problems, it would probably be good if
someone else reported their own experience with it.

I'll keep plodding along and let you know if I uncover anything interesting.

--
David Andrews
A. Duda and Sons, Inc.
dba@duda.com