[vbox-dev] New OS bring up with Vbox ?

[phi gcc]

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Klaus Espenlaub
<Klaus.Espenlaub at sun.com> wrote:
> phi gcc wrote:
>>
>> Hi Klaus,
>>
>> Thanx for the ideas.
>> I am look at various way, and your ideas are good indeed. I try to
>> minimise the weel re-invention.
>
> Please stay on the list... that way more people can contribute and learn.

I missed the reply all, here is the copy of our exchange.


>
> Sounds easily possible... one way avoiding the raw file/vdi conversion would
> be to use a (software) iSCSI target. VirtualBox supports this, presenting it
> as a regular disk to the guest OS.

Very good point, I will loo at it.

>
> You must be careful of course, as (potentially) sharing disks this way is
> not safe at all ;)

Indeed, I use iScsi already for other purpose :)


> Forget it - hand crafting a saved state is nearly impossible. It contains
> the detailed state of the CPU, memory and all devices. Getting the latter
> right is nearly impossible.

May be I misunderstood the concept of a snapshot, I thought it was the
ability from teh host to take an image of all the resource save it and
resume from that state later. In my case I would craft 'snapshoot'
with no 'device' setup as the going to be booted OS would redo the
devices discovery and init.


>>
>> The idea is that I'd like to have guest kernel crashdump efficently.
>
> That sounds feasible - with custom changes to VirtualBox of course.

Hum, I looked a bit into this, downloaded the vbox src and loaded all
the debian packages as said in the man and the build failed, I guess I
got to learn a bit more about using the vbox API for implemented
things and later 'may be' expand vbox capabilities :)

Thanx for your sugestions.
Cheers,
Phi