Re: mac virtualization recommendation

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 08:38:06PM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 
> I have an intel macbook pro just under 2 years old, with 10.5.8.  I have
> parallels 3.0, and on booting netbsd-5 or netbsd-current it hangs after
>   atttimer0: attached to pcppi0

Don't use parallels.  It sucks monkeys.  And they break functionality all
the time and then refuse to respond to bug reports.

VirtualBox works but VMware Fusion is much, much faster.  It's worth
paying for.  If you're going to run 32-bit VMs you'll want to tweak
the VMware virtual machine defaults a bit so you get the emulated
Intel ethernet, which can help performance some.

If you're willing to mess around with the raw VMware config file,
VMware Fusion is extremely configurable and tweakable for many
applications you can't use its competitors for -- Parallels because
it's not very configurable and also just plain broken in many ways,
VirtualBox because many features not turned on by default are very
slow or just don't work.

The one really annoying thing about VMware Fusion is that their
bridged-mode networking does not work if the host interface it's
bridged to is a vlan or lacp bundle.  That makes simulating certain
things (say, routers) using Fusion an exercise in how-many-usb-ethernets-
can-i-plug-into-this-host-system-anyway? which does suck.

But it's just one instance of "sucks".  Parallels has a lot more than that.

Thor