HYpochrit or not

[cohumat]

I've been using several of the Unix work alike operating systems both from the BSDs and the Linuxs' from Red Hat to Debian and in between. I used to think that I had to have several machines or even a sever style machine with a metric crapton of HDDs and SDDs.

Then I found Virtualization platforms like Virtual Box and the VM ware products such as VmWare workstation and VM Ware player. I\ve found that I get much better results when I use VM Ware solutions.

My question to the DaemonForums community is am I a hypocrite for preaching the value of the BSDa, while I myself don't use Net,Free or OpenBSD accept for when I spin up a virtual machine to hoiuse the veriant of BSD that I wnat to tinker with.?

[J65nko]

Maybe you are a HYpochrit because you post a mail address in your signature and then complain about the spam?

From Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit":

Remember what the dormouse said:
Use your head
Use your head

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Don't use VirtualBox or VMWare, they're both proprietary. VirtualBox is particularly bad.

Try QEMU/KVM, OpenBSD works very well under that, it even has virgl support for the graphics card: https://man.openbsd.org/viogpu

[scottro]

To be a bit of a pedant, since that was part of the music I grew up with, the Dormouse said
Feed your head, not use your head.

[hitest]

Calling yourself a hypocrite is harsh. I've run the BSDs in VMs. At the moment I'm running OpenBSD 7.5 on bare metal and I like it a lot.
It's your system. Use it to meet your needs.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I agree with hitest but we should probably point out that OpenBSD's benevolent dictator does not approve of virtualisation:

Originally Posted by Theo de Raadt

> Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits.

You've been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you
should share it.

x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full
kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which
barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating
system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit.

You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a
worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating
systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around
and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.

You've seen something on the shelf, and it has all sorts of pretty
colours, and you've bought it.

That's all x86 virtualization is.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582

Don't get me wrong, I've used OpenBSD in VMs many times, and it works very well, but it does somewhat compromise the security aspect of the OS.

[blackhole]

Personally I can't see the point in running OpenBSD in a VM.

You are presumably running a more mainstream OS and then tinkering or "playing with" other OS in VMs. It's your choice, but in doing so you're not really seeing the benefits of running an OS like OpenBSD - i.e. you're not discovering whether the OS will actually run on your hardware. You've established that it runs on virtualbox or vmware, but so have others. From my perspective you're just repeatedly testing virtualbox or vmware and the OS running those VMs is your actual OS.

[hitest]

Originally Posted by Head_on_a_Stick

I agree with hitest but we should probably point out that OpenBSD's benevolent dictator does not approve of virtualisation:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582

Don't get me wrong, I've used OpenBSD in VMs many times, and it works very well, but it does somewhat compromise the security aspect of the OS.

I love that Theo just speaks the truth without worrying about who he offends(that made me laugh, haha). He's right, of course. At the moment I'm running OpenBSD 7.5 on bare metal, no VMs.

[Carpetsmoker]

For many years, including around the time when I started this forum, I ran Windows with VMWare Workstation and FreeBSD in a VM. This gave me the best of both: Windows for games and such, and FreeBSD for "real work". It worked pretty well for me and eliminated the constant reboots. Even did this at one job.

Computers are about getting stuff done, not ideological purity.

[hitest]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

Computers are about getting stuff done, not ideological purity.

I find this attitude refreshing and welcome. Too often in the *Nix ecosystem users can run into zealotry. On my home LAN I run a mixed collection of Linux and BSD units. They meet my needs. Like you I prefer a pragmatic approach, use whatever works for you. Live and let live.

[e1-531g]

It is good to see some other, more pragmatical take. OpenBSD subforum has motto: Functionally paranoid. Let's not delete functionally from this motto, please.