OpenBSD questions from a Linux user interested in switching

[corinthos]

I like the following in Linux:

1. VirtualBox
2. dm-crypt & lvm for (nearly) whole disk encryption
3. speed (including as desktop system)


Are the above available for OpenBSD (as ports or competing software programs)?

I think, based on what I can pull up on Google, VirtualBox is not available and I'll have to use VMWare? Is this true and if so will I only be able to use an out-of-date version?

Also, does OpenBSD support FDE/WDE (full/whole disk encryption) at all?


I'm not so sure about the answers to 2 and 3 above, except that I hear OpenBSD sacrifices performance/speed for correctness/security. Would it be significantly slower? Is it a myth that OpenBSD is slow or a thing of the past, or is it true?

Thanks!

 

[Nothinman]

Doesn't look like VirtualBox does OpenBSD hosts at all, probably because it needs some kernel modules and noone's ported them. And it looks like there's no official support for OpenBSD hosting VMware either for the same reason.

 

[sourceninja]

I tried to get PC-BSD working in virtualbox. The install was fine, but after the first bootup I could not get X to work. It would crash over and over after the inital login. A look at the logs kept showing undefined errors. Some googling seemed to show this as a problem with virtualbox.

I decided to give it up for now.

 

[QuixoticOne]

It would have told you that it wouldn't work well here:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes

Originally posted by: sourceninja
I tried to get PC-BSD working in virtualbox. The install was fine, but after the first bootup I could not get X to work. It would crash over and over after the inital login. A look at the logs kept showing undefined errors. Some googling seemed to show this as a problem with virtualbox.

I decided to give it up for now.

 

[sciencewhiz]

Do you want to run OpenBSD as a guest inside Virtual Box on your linux machine, or do you want to install openbsd, and run virtual box with a different guest os?

If it's the former, OpenBSD includes QEMU, which at least part of virtual box is based on. They even have a package for kqemu, qemu's kernel module.

 

[corinthos]

thanks for your replies.. how well does QEMU work compared to vmware and virtualbox? and what about full disk encryption? are there any good options for OpenBSD or is that still an area where it falls short? i'd like at least something like dm-crypt and lvm for linux on OpenBSD.. thanks

 

[phisrow]

I'm not sure about disk encryption in BSD, but I've used QEMU a bit. Unlike vmware and virtualbox, QEMU does complete system emulation. On the plus side, that means it can do things like emulate an ARM system on an X86 host and it can function without any special kernel tricks(other than using a tun device for networking, IRRC). On the minus side, full software emulation is considerably slower than vmware and virtualbox's strategy of emulating parts of the system and passing as much native code directly to the CPU as possible. QEMU is good enough for testing purposes, very handy for testing software for a different architecture than your system, and perfectly adequate for running virtualized retrogaming images and the like. It is substantially inferior for applications were virtualization overhead is a problem.