"using a custom [FreeBSD] kernel seems tricky in a VMWare/VirtualBox VM"
This flipped a set-once bit, making the rest of the article essentially unreadable due to zero confidence in the writer's technical skill. Also, the lack of "late 2011" in the title makes it pretty misleading.
I thought the exact same thing. It's trivially simple to run custom kernels. Further, with currentish versions of OSX, you don't even need VMware/VB. The built-in hypervisor works good enough without crash prone kexts like in the alternative in my experience.
Not sure if you read the rest of the article, but it didn't do much to instill technical competence after that point either.
Jails aren't a hypervisor. A jail is just a number in the process table. That's what the hipsters call "containers" these days :-)
FreeBSD's hypervisor is called bhyve (and it uses vmm.ko), and xhyve is a port of bhyve to macOS (uses Apple's Hypervisor.framework). There are other things that use Hypervisor.framework too.
and 2 sentences after describing themselves as someone "whose definition of "fun" includes spending 6 hours in the middle of the night figuring how to get dual boot working with UEFI."
So the author really enjoys debugging boot problems, but a custom kernel in a VM is just too tricky? Is there something I'm missing that makes that way harder than debugging dual boot?
Author here. Debugging dual boot is interesting, debugging virtualbox is not. And I was curious if I can get it running. I just was too lazy to figure it out, I found a more interesting problem to work on. In the end, I stayed in the native FreeBSD install, so there was no motivation to figure out the custom kernel in virtualbox (it is quite simple in bhyve, though)
This flipped a set-once bit, making the rest of the article essentially unreadable due to zero confidence in the writer's technical skill. Also, the lack of "late 2011" in the title makes it pretty misleading.