I’ve never been a big NetBSD guy. I played with it a long time ago (like 30 years ago) when I had a 68K Mac and wanted to run a Unix-like OS on it, and NetBSD was the only option. Since then I’ve fooled around with it once or twice, but I just never had a need that OpenBSD or Linux didn’t meet better.
But recently I saw that NetBSD 11 was released, and it included this brag:
New MICROVM kernel for x86, supporting both i386 and amd64, NetBSD 11.0 introduces a dedicated MICROVM kernel designed for extremely fast virtual machine boot, leveraging PVH boot, VirtIO MMIO, and multiple kernel optimizations, it can boot in about 10 ms on 2020-era x86 CPUs.
That certainly sounds cool! My home Proxmox runs on an i5-8250U which is a little earlier than that. It was released in 2017 Q3. So maybe it won’t be quite 10ms, but it should still be pretty fast. //
However, that live image doesn’t use MBR but rather GPT. So you’ll get this if you use the recipe on NetBSD’s MICROVM page.
...
At that point, I entered a ? and it gave a list of potential disk candidates. I don’t know why I remembered that trick of yore…must be some 30-year-old brain cell that didn’t expire when it was supposed to. Well you know what they say, cache expiry is the hardest problem in computer science.
