to come from Linux to FreeBSD

[Mario Lobo]

On Wednesday 24 August 2011 08:48:30 Julian H. Stacey wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Reference:
> > From:		Dick Hoogendijk <dick at nagual.nl>
> > Date:		Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:24:37 +0200
> > Message-id:	<4E54D165.7090202 at nagual.nl>
> 
> Dick Hoogendijk wrote:
> > Op 24-8-2011 10:41, Matthew Seaman schreef:
> > > Virtualization is actually a bit of a tricky thing with FreeBSD.
> > > There's Jail, which is excellent -- very light weight, but it only
> > > works with FreeBSD guests. There's VirtualBox, but that runs the guest
> > > OSes as a standard client application and it tends to be slow
> > 
> > VirtualBox is absolutely not slow. At least not on Solaris nor on
> > windows7 boxes. The VB support from FreeBSD is not that good imho. It is
> > a lot easier to get it going under linux, windows or solaris. I know,
> > fbsd packages do not exist. I wonder why...
> > 

I don't know how you guys have been installing Virtualbox on FreeBSD but I 
have been using it since 3.x.x, Always compiling it from ports (using 4.1.2 
now), almost without glitch. The "almost" is on account of a long gone bug 
with nvidia driver versions 1.7.something. Nothing to do with VB. After that, 
no glitches anymore.

As how it runs on my 8-STABLE amd64, I've been able to compare it to vmware 
and hiper-v and as far as running the same things on the 3 of them, to me, 
VBox outperformed both in terms of speed and responsiveness. All 3 are pretty 
stable and hiper-v needs a monster machine to run, contrary to VB and VW. 

I have linux (fedora, centos and ubuntu), OS-x (hackintosh and SL), Os/2, 
Android, Xp (32/64),Win 2003 and win7 (32/64) vms, all jumping from VB version 
to VB version, all without a single glitch, and all performing better with 
each new version. I went as far as installing a background VB Xp vm on my 
firewall (which is a small FBSD 8-STABLE i386 ) for application testing 
purposes.

I can't say how VB runs on huge environments because I don't have access to 
any.

As for support for VB in general, just stay tunned to 

VBox-users-community at lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/vbox-users-community

and

vbox-dev at virtualbox.org
http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev

and

http://forums.virtualbox.org/

I'm sure anyone will find all questions answered.

and specific to FreeBSD. Bernhard Froehlich has been doing a wonderful job, 
constantly updating the VB ports. Check out

https://svn.bluelife.at/index.cgi/blueports 

under emulators.


-- 
Mario Lobo
http://www.mallavoodoo.com.br
FreeBSD since 2.2.8 [not Pro-Audio.... YET!!] (99% winblows FREE)