More virtually real troubles

So after fighting with QEmu and surrendering to KVM I finally got a FreeBSD 7.1 vanilla instance, and an OpenSolaris instance running; I made sure that feng builds on both, and since I was there I also fixed up the SCTP autoconf check on both, so that feng can ideally speak SCTP with both of them.

A note here for those interested: SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) is a protocol, alternative to TCP and UDP, that is designed to work well for streaming applications; the fact that feng supports it is more a proof of concept than an actually useful feature, I’m sincerely not sure how well it works nowadays, but since I had to fight to get it to build correctly on Linux already, I just wanted to fix it up for FreeBSD and Solaris implementations as well; I assumed that Apple had its own implementation as well but even though there are APPLE defines in the FreeBSD implementations, at least OS X 10.5 lacks any SCTP support that I can see.

I already have reserved a logical volume for Gentoo/FreeBSD 7.1 which I’m hopefully going to test today, but in the mean time I wanted to fix up NetBSD too, since I have seen that it also has an SCTP stack, and since none of the three we support now is identical to the other it seemed worth looking into it; unfortunately NetBSD is proving to have no network to offer me. While I set up the KVM instance just like any other, no matter which model I use I can see no device in ifconfig -a output of NetBSD; I have chosen the full installation, but still it doesn’t seem to have much. The documentation also doesn’t seem to help.

I guess NetBSD will keep waiting in line for now, unless somebody has a suggestion on how to deal with it.