Re: Experiences with 7.0-CURRENT and vmware.

On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 01:28:16PM +0100, Robert Watson wrote:

On Thu, 10 May 2007, Darren Reed wrote:

I'm using FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT under vmware and there are a few issues.

Redirecting to current@...

First, time. hint.hw.acpi.disabled="1" This appears to make _no_
difference to time keeping on FreeBSD 7 and nor does it seem to have any
impact on ACPI being loaded. Do I need to recompile a new kernel without
it or is there a new way to disable ACPI?

Have you tried hint.acpi.0.disabled=1 instead? This is what appears in
acpi(4), and is what is used in various existing boot loader bits when I
grep around.

In another reply it was "hint.apic.0.disabled=1".
My current loader.conf:

vm.kmem_size=536870912
vm.kmem_size_max=536870912
unset acpi_load
hint.acpi.0.disabled=1
hint.apci.0.disabled=1
hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"
hint.apci.0.disabled="1"
vfs.zfs.arc_max=402653184

Booting with this gives me:
kernel: Timecounter "ACPI-safe" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 1000

and ACPI enabled.

I should add that FreeBSD 6, with the same setting, is no better and that
I need to run ntpdate every 5-10 minutes via crontab in order to keep good
time (timekeeping is *really* bad.) In one instance, i was watching
"zpool iostat 1" and it appeared like the rows were muching up at a rate
of 2 a second for a minute or so. How do I disable TSC timekeeping?
(NetBSD has this disabled by default in their kernels.) Or is there
somethign else I must do?

kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-fast
kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) ACPI-fast(1000) i8254(0) dummy(-1000000)

I believe you can simply set kern.timecounter.hardware=APCI-fast and it
will do what you expect. An interesting question is why it selects what is
arguably the wrong one; a post to current@ might help resolve that.

Hmm.

# sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware="ACPI-fast"
kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-safe
sysctl: kern.timecounter.hardware: Invalid argument

Or is this a loader.conf setting?

Second, networking. Prior to FreeBSD-7, the driver to use inside vmware
workstation was lnc. It has worked and contiues to work great. No
problemo. FreeBSD-7 uses the "em" driver. To put it simply, it sucks in
comparison. When things really get bad I start seeing "em0: watchdog
timeout" messages on the console. I looked and I don't see a lnc driver
anywhere. Is there another alternative (le?) driver that I can use in
place of em, if so, how?

Has VMware changed what network hardware they emulate, and/or does VMware
offer options about what virtual hardware to expose?

I don't believe so. It still probes as pcn under NetBSD.

The if_em driver is
for Intel ethernet cards; historically VMware has exposed a Lance ethernet
device supported by the lnc(4) device driver; now that driver has indeed
been replaced with le(4).

Right. I believe it still is lance, but somehow em is showing up.

But if if_em is probing, it suggests a VMware
change rather than a FreeBSD change, which you may be able to revert by
telling it to expose a Lance-style device as opposed to an Intel device.

There's no way to choose the type of card vmware emulates.

Generally speaking, this would be a discouraged configuration, but you will
probably need to frob two settings: first, PermitEmptyPasswords in
sshd_config, and second, force non-PAM validation by setting UsePAM to
false. Instead of doing this, I would advise instead setting up an SSH key
for the account, and not set a passphrase on the SSH key. This doesn't
require any changing of the global sshd configuration and should offer most
of the same benefits.

btw, there are instances where you can be promopted 6 times for a
password when logging in with ssh, 3 times with "Password:" prompt
and another three with "root@hostname's password:" promopt.

Darren
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Experiences with 7.0-CURRENT and vmware.
    ... difference to time keeping on FreeBSD 7 and nor does it seem to have any ... FreeBSD-7 uses the "em" driver. ... Has VMware changed what network hardware they emulate, ... I would advise instead setting up an SSH key ...
    (freebsd-hackers)
  • Re: Experiences with 7.0-CURRENT and vmware.
    ... difference to time keeping on FreeBSD 7 and nor does it seem to have any ... FreeBSD-7 uses the "em" driver. ... Has VMware changed what network hardware they emulate, ... I would advise instead setting up an SSH key ...
    (freebsd-hackers)
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    (freebsd-hackers)
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    ... I'm using FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT under vmware and there are a few issues. ... FreeBSD-7 uses the "em" driver. ... and how do I fix ssh/rsh to do passwordless sessions? ...
    (freebsd-hackers)
  • Re: Experiences with 7.0-CURRENT and vmware.
    ... I'm using FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT under vmware and there are a few issues. ... FreeBSD-7 uses the "em" driver. ... and how do I fix ssh/rsh to do passwordless sessions? ...
    (freebsd-hackers)