Installing FreeBSD 2.2.9-RELEASE on a virtual machine

E

ernie

I have some old a.out FreeBSD binaries that I don't have the source for, that are running on a very old PII system that could fail any day. I would like to move them over to some new hardware, but FreeBSD 2.2.8 does not support modern hardware. So I figured that I could install FreeBSD 2.2.9-RELEASE under some form of virtual machine to solve the problem. I have tried Virtualbox, VMware Fusion on a Mac, Parallels on a Mac, and none of them will install FreeBSD 2.2.9 properly. Fusion worked the best, but it won't provide a network adapter that FreeBSD 2.2.9 can recognize.

Has anyone successfully managed to run FreeBSD 2.2.8 or 2.2.9 on a virtual machine reliably? I don't care what the host OS is, I will use whatever works well.
 
Have you tried emulators/qemu with uhh . . . (digs around for a moment) -net nic,model=ne2k_isa? That should be the one that literally everything in the universe has drivers for, if anything.

Honestly, I could never get anything earlier than 5.x to see the qemu hard drives correctly, but that may be been my boneheadedness.

edit: Well, it seems to work, kind of. Wow, the disks are sloooooow, though.
 
I believe you can run a.out binaries on 8.x. Just compile a custom kernel with COMPAT_AOUT and you should be good to go. You will likely need the shared libraries and what have you from your 2.2.9 release, but the image format is still supported.
 
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