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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

You can try it right now inside virtualbox, and 20 minutes later you realize that it is has all you need. After a few days, you'll notice that you spend most of your time inside the virtual machine, and then it makes sense to turn your setting upside down and work directly on the saner system.

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It may have all that you need, but that sweeping generalization is far from true for everyone.

For example, things that I need that it does not have (last that I checked) include: filesystem-neutral nmount(), POSIX RT signals, the "new" 1990s dynamic PTY allocation system, a KDGETMODE ioctl on wscons, waitid(), fexecve(), and ACLs.

And then there are the things that would make life easier to not have to bodge around: const-correct ncurses API (available in ncurses since 1997), const-correct login_cap API, const-correct sysctl(), and no multiple evaluations in EV_SET().

It would be very welcome for it to gain all of these, but until then there is no "it has all that you need" realization on the cards.

How well does the inverse works - running VMs in OpenBSD to use Windows, Linux? Is it for example possible to run Virtualbox with good performance in OpenBSD?

I'm tempted at using OpenBSD as OS, but need to run things like MS Office. A VM is probably the easiest way to do that.

> How well does the inverse works - running VMs in OpenBSD to use Windows, Linux? Is it for example possible to run Virtualbox with good performance in OpenBSD?

As far as I know this is not possible. You can always do it with qemu but it wouldn't be practical.

If libreoffice is not appropriate for your needs, you may try googledocs inside the browser.

MS Office is just one of many applications that I need to use. I use loads of EDA tools that either only exists for Windows, or Linux.

I have been a user of LibreOffice since it was called StarOffice. It is dog slow, still has an ugly UI, crashes etc. But for many things it has been and is good enough. (and keeps getting better). Unfortunately, customers wants to use Word-specific files, Excel-specific files with macros and whatnot that just don't work in Libre. Google does not handle these files correctly either. It is not a fault of these alternatives, but a world where people don't realize that they are being locked in. They use the features of the tools they have to solve their problems.

(I guess this became a bit off-tangent)

In your situation, then, you'll be happy by running openbsd in a virtual machine from your windows.

MacOS actually. In which I have Windows in a VM (and a few Linux versions), which works really well. The MacOS BSD userland is something I use extensively. But when the next laptop update cycle comes I can't see myself getting a new MBP.

So what I was hoping to do, and the reason for asking about the state of running VMs in OpenBSD is of course to use it as the main OS, and run the other OSes I need to use in VM. Basically as I do today. I would be close to home in terms if userland experience and gfet good (better) security.

BTW: I found this presentation by Mike Larkin from March 2018 about the state of vmm:

https://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2018-vmm-slides.pdf

Apart from the fun and learning experience, I don't really see a point in running OpenBSD in a VM. In fact I have a OpenBSD 6.3 in a VM today. Playing around with pledge has been very interesting.

QEMU sounds like a rather heavy way to do it.

I've always thought of qemu as the lightweight way to virtualizea system, but maybe it's just an impression.

Or did you mean that using a VM is a heavy way to try a system out?

As a heavier way of running a VM then what you get using the hardware virtualization support in the CPU the way most modern VM systems do like VMware, Virtualbox, Parallels etc.

QEMU uses KVM when available, so you are using hardware support.

There is an OpenBSD-specific hypervisor (vmm) in recent releases.

I cannot comment on whether it is suitable for running VMs at this time.

Ok, I'll check it out. Thanks!

* Windows VMs

From what I've gathered (and experienced last time I've tried it), Windows support is nonexistent right now. That might change eventually, but OpenBSD and Linux (and I think NetBSD?) are the initial targets.

QEMU is available in packages/ports, though; while almost certainly slow, it's a start. VirtualBox on Linux requires a kernel module, so unless someone manages to port that to OpenBSD (which would translate to adding it to OpenBSD's kernel, which doesn't support loadable kernel modules anymore), that one probably ain't an option.

OpenBSD just isn't performant enough for me. I can't honestly say that it has what I need when I get multi-second system freezes when opening or closing tabs in chromium (though this was under 6.0)

Battery life under OpenBSD is atrocious compared even to Linux.

It's a great server OS but it's not ready for laptop daily driver use unless your laptop just sits plugged in all day.

I really enjoy have openbsd on a server that I ssh into.

OS X and Windows are better GUI, OpenBSD is a better place for a lot of my work... basically anything that I’d use emacs for.

I use it as a daily driver for my laptop. It's quite performant. I also boot a linux distro sometimes on that machine, and don't notice much difference in battery life between the two.

They've been adding drivers like crazy for a while now, too, so there are many more hardware choices than there were a couple years ago.

Well, on my x220 the difference between OpenBSD and Debian was more than an hour of battery life, to say nothing of tabbing freezes.

Is there an OCI runtime for one of the BSDs available? I saw some commit messages in the containerd repository mentioning OpenBSD, but afaik running containers on BSD is still not officially supported?

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