Building a Vagrant Box for PS2 Development

mlafeldt.github.com

39 pointsmlafeldt4 comments

Wow, wish I had known about Vagrant before, this is amazing. Not to mention this is super convenient for various platform devs.

I hope Vagrant works for you, but I want to correct some expectations.

I like the idea of Vagrant. Most of us at work used to use it. The problem is that Vagrant uses Virtualbox, and Virtualbox on OS X seems to have all kinds of performance problems. The biggest issue was that lots of disk IO in the guest would cause it to freeze for 30-60 seconds. At the start of these freezes, the message `aio_queue_async_request: too many in flight for proc: 16` was printed in the system log. Increasing kern.aioprocmax didn't help. Neither did enabling or disabling various Virtualbox options related to disk IO.

We ended up ditching Vagrant for Parallels and VMWare Fusion with some semi-automated setup scripts.

AngryParsley: To be honest, I haven't done that much performance-intensive stuff under Vagrant on OS X. Cross-compiling the PS2 toolchain took about 10 minutes on my 2011 MacBook Air. And of course it's a different matter when you want to use Vagrant in production at work. But I think it's just fine to compile some homebrew without much hassle.

Exactly. Already waiting for someone to build ps3dev.box :)

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