Rubénerd!

To drastically improve virtual drive performance of qemu guests, create images with metadata preallocation:

% qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o size=2147483648,preallocate=metadata disk.qcow2

Then if you're on Linux, use fallocate to preallocate space:

% fallocate -l 2147483648 disk.qcow2

Passing this on for what it may be worth, they both saved me a lot of time copying files this morning. :)

For all of you operating system enthusiasts, VMware Fusion 3.0 was just released for the Mac.

I bought a licence for Fusion 1.0 as soon as it came out in 2007 (Just bought VMWare Fusion) because at the time I was testing various different flavours of BSD and the later builds of Parallels Desktop weren't playing nicely with them. By contrast, despite being heavily advertised as a way to run Windows, Fusion also had additions for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.

Given I got Fusion 2.0 as a free upgrade, being told I'd have to shell out AU$49.00 for 3.0 was a bit of a kick in the stomach, but if after using the trial for 30 days the performance is noticeably better I'll upgrade.

The pointless OS rambling episode!

Recording shows at 03:45am; bizarre South Australian and Indian timezones off by half an hour; installing operating systems in virtual machines, VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, Parallels Desktop, VirtualBox; getting your hands dirty with real partitioning; choosing from FreeBSD, Draco GNU/Linux, OS/2 Warp 4.x, BeOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, NetBSD; why it's a great time for OS enthusiasts to be alive; and why this should really have been filed under Rubenerd Unplugged and not made into a proper show!

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 17:00 7.9MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.