Re: mac virtualization recommendation

["David H. Gutteridge" <dhgutteridge%sympatico.ca@localhost>]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:38:06 -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
>What are people's current recomendations for running netbsd in a vm on a
>mac?  I would like to be able to do kernel debugging, plus use the
>netbsd system normally.  As long as a license is less than a $100-$200,
>I don't really care how much; I'd rather minimize grief.  It seems the
>plausible choices are vmware fusion and parallels.

Many people have already commented, but here are my two cents.  I've
been using VMWare Fusion since its 2.0 beta days (they lured me with
the free trial), and I just upgraded to 3.0 last week.  I haven't used
it for anything exotic; I've been pretty happy with it for my purposes.

One thing I will mention, because I haven't seen it touched on in the
other responses: I have had a problem with X.  Back when -current was
still shipping with XFree86 4.5.0 (and so it was using the vesa driver
under VMWare Fusion), I didn't have any issues (except, perhaps things
look slightly blurry).  After -current switched to X.org and the vmware
driver came into the mix, I have problems with X starting and/or
exiting under both Fusion 2.0.x and 3.0.  I just tried duplicating this
and could.  If I start X, it works fine.  When I exit, the screen goes
blank and never returns to the console.  I don't know if this is
because the vmware driver isn't restoring enough "hardware" state or
something else.  I should note that VM instance is based on a 5.99.11
build, so it does not take into account all the upgrades to X.org that
mrg@ has committed recently.  I was planning to upgrade and re-test,
but haven't got to it yet.  (I haven't tried substituting the vesa
driver either, I assume that's feasible.)

Regards,

Dave