Virtualizing OpenBSD

The OpenBSD developers are pretty clear on virtualization. OpenBSD is written for real hardware. Virtual hardware is not real hardware. While it can be very similar, it’s not exactly the same.

This approach has a number of implications, the most problematic of which is that not all virtualization software can run OpenBSD. As I write this, Oracle’s VirtualBox can’t cleanly run either i386 or amd64 OpenBSD. (Some people report being able to boot some versions of VirtualBox and/or OpenBSD, but OpenBSD software crashes all over the place.) This is not an OpenBSD bug. VirtualBox doesn’t sufficiently emulate real hardware.

That said, OpenBSD does run well on some virtual machines. VMware works well enough that OpenBSD includes ...

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