Re: concerns about install freebsd

From: David Christensen <dpchrist_at_holgerdanske.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2022 05:46:45 UTC 
On 9/28/22 20:12, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> 
>> On 28. Sep 2022, at 20:08, jian he <jian.universality@gmail.com> wrote:
>>   Can I install linux and freebsd in the same machine (I think it's intel x86 architecture)?

> yes, you can install both on the same machine.


Have you set up dual boot with Linux and FreeBSD on an x86-64/amd64 
system?  If so, please describe.


> While it‘s possible to run one operating system as guest inside of the another operating system, this approach has got several disadvantages.

> If you want to test operating systems, a starting point to do this is using persistent live media. For example, copy several Linux live ISO to a Ventoy USB-stick and make them persistent and get NomadBSD. Testing an operating system as guest in a virtual machine suffers from the limits of the virtualization, especially when using VirtualBox, let alone that anything hardware related depends on the host‘s drivers, hence you can‘t experience hardware support of the guest.


For hardware support testing, I agree that a live CD can be useful.


For evaluating FreeBSD support of specific hardware, I would try the 
FreeBSD installer "Live CD" option (see Figure 3):

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/bsdinstall/#bsdinstall-start


NomadBSD advertises "automatic hardware detection and setup", which 
might conceal potential problems with a genuine FreeBSD installation.


For OS and software evaluation, an advantage of a (supported) VM is that 
there should be few, if any, device driver issues (e.g. virtual hardware 
is known and supported).  This allows you focus on FreeBSD, vscode, etc..


For example, I have a VM with FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE-p6 GENERIC amd64 that 
is running on VirtualBox 6.1.38 on Debian 11.5 Linux 5.10.0-18-amd64.  I 
see one error message via dmesg(8):

2022-09-28 22:21:19 toor@vf1 ~
# dmesg | grep -i error
module_register_init: MOD_LOAD (vesa, 0xffffffff811848b0, 0) error 19


AIUI "vesa" is an X Windows driver.  I access the VM via ssh(1) and have 
not installed X, so the error message does not concern me.


David