I had my FreeBSD development environment on the failed RAID. I haven't turned that computer on again yet (waiting to have time to reconfigure and test it properly, more on that another day). My only running server-ish box at home is now an old FreeBSD 4 system, so I figured I could get FreeBSD 6 running under Virtual PC on the mac. It runs, but darn it's slow! "make buildworld buildkernel" is running for many many many hours. It's plenty fast for regular use, but rebuilding the system (which is what I do for $secret_project on my development FreeBSD box) is SLOW. I am not sure exactly how slow because the mac goes to sleep when I leave it, but it's been running since yesterday.
With a MacBook Pro on order I was wondering if VMware will come out for Intel-OS X. I wrote to them and asked and they replied
Thank you for your inquiry. Unfortunately, we do not provide information in advance of an official press release. My only suggestion is to stay tuned to our website for further details.
If you squint right, then that's almost a confirmation, no? :-)
I realize Microsoft is likely to update Virtual PC to run on the Intel Macs (they already have Virtual PC for Windows on Intel). but a bit more competition wouldn't hurt.
The Yonah / Intel Core Duo chips have will in the future have Intels Vanderpool/VT technology, so if we are really lucky OS X will eventually get some support for virtualization too.
I think we're in the same boat. I have a fully loaded PowerBook G4 and would love to load up FreeBSD or Linux in a virtual environment for testing / kernel development.
No such luck.
I too got the same response from VMware a couple weeks ago. I mean how freakin' cool would it be to have VMware, the mother of all emulation/virtualization running on a brand new MacBookPro 1.83 w/2 gigs of ram.
10 days and counting for the hardware.
I guess you guys have seen the Q project - a port of QEMU to OSX...
http://kberg.ch/q/
Although right now it is simulating the x86 processor they are currently working on a kernel module to allow processor vitualisation on x86 based Macs - similar to vmware.
Cheers,
aid
I got almost a same answer, I think we must wait. My MacBook Pro I'll get hopefully tomorrow.
I rebuilt OpenBSD in a Virtual PC, it took 2 days, 14 hours and 10 minutes. See my Virtual make build weblog entry for details. I would guess FreeBSD is about 60% of that time to build, since it doesn't contain perl, apache and other things like that in the base system.
Interestingly I got the exact same response from VMWare when I asked them about VMWare for Mac OS X. In the meantime I've discovered Parallels Workstation for Mac which seems to be a VMWare equivalent, currently in beta for Mac. If I had an Intel Mac I'd try it out.