Bounty and timeline on vmware 5.x on FreeBSD 6.x

[Eric Anderson]

On 04/04/07 17:17, Per Hedeland wrote:
> Christian Laursen <xi at borderworlds.dk> wrote:
>> "Rick C. Petty" <rick-freebsd at kiwi-computer.com> writes:
>>
>>> On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 01:44:01PM -0500, Eric Anderson wrote:
>>>>         libglibmm-2.4.so.1 => not found
>>>>         libglibmm_generate_extra_defs-2.4.so.1 => not found
>>>>         libatkmm-1.6.so.1 => not found
>>>>         libpangomm-1.4.so.1 => not found
>>>>         libgdkmm-2.4.so.1 => not found
>>>>         libgtkmm-2.4.so.1 => not found
>>>>         libgnomecanvasmm-2.6.so.1 => not found
>>>>         libsexymm.so.1 => not found
>>> I suspect most of these come from their GNOME C++ counterparts, such as
>>> glibmm, gtkmm, gnomemm, libgnomecanvasmm, libsexymm, et al.  Not sure if
>>> this would work but you could try installing the freebsd ports for these
>>> and adding some /etc/libmap.conf entries??
>> That will not work. Linux binaries need linux libraries, so the right thing
>> to do would be to make linux-* ports of the neccesary linux libraries.
> 
> I don't want to dissuade anyone from trying, but unless things have
> changed drastically from vmware 3/4, the hard part of getting it to work
> on FreeBSD isn't finding Linux libraries for the binary, nor even
> fiddling with the Linuxolator to provide additional support for it (if
> that is even needed), but to port the Linux versions of the vmmon and
> (assuming you want networking) vmnet kernel modules.
> 
> Source for these used to be, and probably still is, available in the
> vmware distribution, but it's a significant amount of work for someone
> with good kernel knowledge, and the requirements seem to be more or less
> different for each combination of vmware version and FreeBSD version
> (i.e. you need to produce vmware-version-specific ports with lots of
> FreeBSD #ifdefs). The diffs for vmware-3-vmmon are over 7000 lines.
> 
> Orlando had "almost finished" the vmmon port for vmware 4, but there
> were still some problems left (e.g. it couldn't run on SMP FreeBSD
> IIRC), and he hadn't even started on vmnet (I believe that's the simpler
> of the two though, you basically replace it completely with an interface
> to if_tap which has/had most of the functionality needed). I had vmware
> 4 running briefly with his preliminary vmmon port, but without
> networking it was useless to me.
> 
> Note that this isn't optional optimization stuff like kqemu, vmware will
> not run without vmmon, and will not have networking without vmnet.
> Again, this is the case with vmware 3/4, I haven't even looked at
> current versions.

Thanks for the info - all good points.  We'll never know unless someone 
at least *tries* to make it work, which is all I'm doing.  I just want 
to know what the barriers are, so someone who just wants to code can 
jump right in and start hacking away without all this other stuff in the 
way.

I think once the ToDo list is known, a post to -hackers and/or -current 
would be good to get general input and possible volunteers to help work 
it out.

Maybe the real question is, what is QEMU missing, that VMWare has?  I 
can think of three things right off:

- Good video card support
- Real PXE enabled network card
- VM extension use (huge in my opinion)

Maybe focus on those is also important too?

Eric