I've been playing some with bochs.  (We bounced some messages around netbsd-help
on the more general issue of running bochs as an application from pkgsrc, but
this message is about running NetBSD/i386 *on* bochs...*on* NetBSD.  (^&)

I'm getting a ton of lines to the .txt log file about setting LBA for the
hard disk.  Is this normal?  The log file is now over 250,000 lines long,
almost all of which (basically all but the first few lines) are of the general
form:

121048474343i[HD   ] enabling LBA mode


Could this be related to the terrible performance that NetBSD gets on bochs?
I've noticed that NetBSD can become positively *snappy* if you turn off the
"pit: realtime=1" option and set the "ips: " number *low*.  Basically, this
tells bochs to update the virtual clock very rapidly.  NetBSD then reports
a CPU speed corresondingly low, and apparently uses the low speed to calibrate
some timing loops.  Since it's all virtual anyway, short loops are fine for
nearly everything.  NetBSD would be usable this way...EXCEPT:

Without "pit: realtime=1", NetBSD gets a screwey key-repeat set so high that
it is impossible for me to type a key without getting a lot of repeats.


Is there a nice way around this that anyone knows?  I'm running a NetBSD-current
from sometime in September, FWIW.  (Actually, I'm reinstalling it at the moment.
I know that NetBSD didn't like it when I had 120 heads on my virtual disk, so
I was fiddling with some of the parameters of the disk, which seem to have, without
altering the disk size, rendered the disk unbootable.)


(Aside, this system that I'm running on seems to turn in about 54MIPS in
emulation.  (^&  At least, that seems to be what the NetBSD kernel is
roughly approaching when I have "pit: realtime=1".)


Also, I see people talking about running memtest (I assume from pkgsrc),
so I was wondering what you were doing to get files onto the bochs drive
after installing.  From a quick read of the info for setting up the
bochs NIC, it sounded like the virtual NE2000 was of limited use (though
soemone else had a different interpretation).  If you don't use that, do
you make CD ISOs and mount them?  Or do you use pttys on the host and
/dev/tty?? on bochs to do SLIP or PPP?

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/