Parallels

From NetBSD Wiki

Parallels Desktop for Mac is a virtualization platform for the i386/Mac. Its ideal for a Macbook Pro, or similar recent model.

There are two versions of relevance here at the moment. Parallels 3, which is reasonably stable, and works well with Bootcamp if you want to use a GPT tagged partition on your Mac hard drive, and Parallels 4, which is less mature, does not currently seem to work for NetBSD using the Bootcamp/GPT tagged partition (if previously used for Parallels 3, at least) but does work with emulated 'virtual' disk, and has some significant improvements over Parallels 3 in terms of the virtual PC devices it offers.

On Parallels 3, you can use an ACPI enabled kernel. On Parallels 4, its best to disable ACPI, either in the boot.cfg or if you prefer by setting the "acpi=0" flag in the server.

On Parallels 3 and 4, the VT-x extensions appear to interact badly with some boot time probes in the current (NetBSD 5) kernel. Its best to either disable these in the boot, or disable VT-x optimizations in the Parallels UI.

Parallels 4 is said to support amd64 class CPUs. I haven't been able to make this work yet, so I run i386 NetBSD.

NetBSD 5 RC4 is working well.

NFS mount to the OSX Leopard works well.

VPNC can be used inside the NetBSD to run a true vpn through the Mac into a corporate lan, the network is quite stable, with some possible issues around MTU and fragmentation.