On Mon, 5 Dec 2022 at 12:48, Mayuresh <mayur...@acm.org> wrote: > > On Sat, Dec 03, 2022 at 02:50:00PM +0100, Martin Husemann wrote: > > I would not go via the VM detour, but instead: > > Just curious, what can go wrong this way. > I have installed OSs (Not NetBSD) using this method in the past, giving the VM full access to the physical disk. however the disk booted in the VM wasn't in use by the host. (Infact, as I was in Windows there's no way to give the VM this low level access to the OSs boot disk).
It does seem to be possible to boot QEMU off the host disk under Linux (by pointing it at the block device rather than a partition), but you could really set yourself up for problems. (Qemu writing to the wrong bit of your disk may end badly. :D ) If you try I suspect you could get away with creating the parition in linux first, and setting the partition type, so the NetBSD VM doesn't have to update the partition table at all. It's probably worth unmounting the /boot EFI partitoin in linux too, just to be safe. Oh, and run a 'sync' in linux too, just to be sure, it really does like to cache writes. (I mean it's shouldn't cache writes to critical file system things, but it's best to be sure). You could then probably newfs the partition in the VM and manually expand the base sets and bung on a kernel. (It's been a couple of years since I installed NetBSD, but I assume nothing's changed that would prevent this from working since?) As others have said I'd then manually copy the necessary files to the EFI partiton and setup whatever current bootloader you're using to boot NetBSD. Ian