How to make a FreeBSD vm in virtualbox.

[Tim Kientzle]

> On Dec 30, 2014, at 7:42 PM, Alfred Perlstein <alfred at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello Release engineering team & hackers,
> 
> Ryan (cc'd) did some work on the recent FreeBSD vms that were released.
> 
> Ryan is working at Norse with us and using FreeBSD now.  His background is backend development in io.js, node.js and php on Linux.
> 
> He's now trying to get io.js working on FreeBSD.
> 
> In doing so he wanted to setup a VM, so he downloaded the vmdk and created a blog post on what was needed to be done in order to get it working under virtualbox.  That blog is here: 
> 
>  http://blog.kidicarus.cool/blog/2014/12/24/freebsd-guest-on-mac-osx-host-via-virtualbox/
> 
> After he linked it to me, I decided that it would make sense if this was scripted and would really make sense as part of the release process.

Crochet has had support (for about a year now) for building VMWare images directly (the full image, not just the vmdk).  Such images can be booted directly in Fusion with no extra effort.  For a while, I used that to upgrade my FreeBSD dev environment (build a new image with appropriate password and an fstab that NFS mounts all the home and source directories) rather than doing in-place source upgrades.

If anyone wants to rip that code out into a separate tool that accepts a pre-built vmdk, the code is pretty self-contained:

      https://github.com/kientzle/crochet-freebsd/tree/master/board/VMWareGuest

I also looked at generating Parallels images but the format is undocumented and considerably more complex.

Never looked at .ova.

Tim