So I've done some porting of ptts, which is documented here, but it turns out it had a bug that needed fixing. This also means new release and that means recompiling. I don't have any Windows machine on me, so I had to do some VM experiments, which I planed to do a bit later into my FreeBSD journey.
At first, I tried the easy route and installed VirtualBox. It turns out that the port is broken however, and the kernel module does not support current version. Accorting to forums, recompiling should do the trick, but that would be a bit too much work (and dependencies) just to setup a program I plan on replacing.
What is bhyve? Well, it stands for BSD hypervisor (somehow?). It's the FreeBSD's native virtualisation tool.
I didn't want to use it right now, because as you can see from the handbook entry, it's a complex tool that takes a LOT of arguments and configuration. I was saved however, as there are some frendlier frontends for all this.
I decided for vm-bhyve, because it feels simple and well documented. Also plain UFS support (which I have for reasons detailed in previous post).
I set up a VM mostly by just following the title page instructions and the Windows specific instructions.
I decided to have all VM stuff in '/vm/', as it can only be accessed by root, so it doesn't feel right to have it in my '$HOME'. I like how stuff comes in modules and you need to enable/setup them in '/etc/rc.conf', but it is a bit annoying to remove remove them.
I called:
sudo vm iso ~/Downloads/win10-install.iso sudo vm create -t windows winguest sudo vm install winguest win10-install.iso
The vm started in the background and nothing happened. This is because if you want to run a graphical VM, you have to use a VNC protocol. I installed TigerVNC and connected with the address 0.0.0.0:5900.
From there it was a normal Windows install, except that I had no internet. You see, vm-bhyve has problems with using Wi-Fi as a bridged network. To solve this, I had to create a NAT using the pf(4) tool and then create a vm-bhyve switch with no interface, but a IP of the default gateway of that network, as documented in the vm-bhyve manual.
I also tried the DHCP server, but it didn't work. No problem tho, as I can still set network information by hand.
I needed to install the crystal language. The crystal installer by itself is not enough however, as it also needs the Windows SDK.
Turns out the default 20GB disk was not enough for the Windows install, so I had to get a bigger disk. Thankfully, it was not that hard tho:
# create a 40GB file truncate -s 40G disk1.img # copy the data dd if=disk0.img of=disk1.img conv=notrunc
I didn't manage to expand the partition however, so I had to reinstall anyways.
I encountered this very strange bug, where the VM (or just the VNC?) would freeze and not even restarting the WM would fix it. I had to reboot the entire machine. This however only happened during the crystal installer, which I find quite strange.
I compiled the program, but now I needed to get the executable on my main system to make the github release. Normally I would start a simple python web server, but since it's behind a NAT, that was not a option. I decided to mount the disk instead.
long sotry short:
sudo mdconfig -a -t vnode -u 0 -f disk1.img sudo ntfs-3g /dev/md0p3 /mnt
You will need to install and enable the 'fusefs-ntfs' package.
mdconfig(8) is used to create a virtual disk '/dev/md0' from the image file.
After further testing, I can say that
sudo mdconfig disk1.img
should be enough
If you ask why I wasn't able to expand the partition, this is the disk:
% gpart show /dev/md0
=> 34 83886013 md0 GPT (40G)
34 2014 - free - (1.0M)
2048 204800 1 efi (100M)
206848 32768 2 ms-reserved (16M)
239616 82571749 3 ms-basic-data (39G)
82811365 1563 - free - (782K)
82812928 1069056 4 ms-recovery (522M)
83881984 4063 - free - (2.0M)
The new space extended the last 'free' space and Windows wasn't able to move 'ms-recovery'.
I actually quite like it.
I will conduct more experiments in the future.