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Later on, the developer (Kevin) was hired by Mandrake soft, and the whole thing was licensed under LGPL.

Actually, linux is a supported platform

No it isn't. To support "Linux," you have to make your source available to recompile on every architecture that has a Linux kernel. It supports "Linux86" which is a subset of supporting Linux. It doesn't support Linux on PowerPC, Linux on MIPS, Linux on SPARC, or Linux on Alpha.

Or are you suggesting using AIM for Linux on an emulation layer such as Bochs? Good luck routing network packets through that.

until they release a PPC binary I literally cannot use an official client on the machine I use to chat.

Have you tried Bochs (Lesser GPL) or Connectix Virtual PC (proprietary) for running PC programs on your Mac?

We will always be able to use PC emulators such as BOCHS for that. The only problem is nobody is making sequels. I heard even the One Must Fall sequel that's coming out soon will be completely different than what we're used to... You'd think at least they would have made it like Soul Calibur, but I think it's going to be like Slave Zero... :/

The truth is that it is in the packaging. Any time that something becomes difficult to install, many people will drop it. For example, I was just trying to get Bochs up and running last night. When I tried to compile the code, the compile would fail every time. I went in and found that some of the header files had a definition of NULL that the compiler didn't like. So I changed it and tried again. Now it was something else. So I found the binary for my system and tried that. Of course, libstdc++ just said "symbol __ti9exception not found". Finally, I just downloaded a BSD ports package which installed and ran without issue, even though it was source.

The reason why binaries are more popular is that they are generally easier to package. The dependancies of source is such that you must have the right compiler, the right linker, the right header files, (sometimes) the right platform, etc. The dependencies with binaries are such that you must have the right platform, and the right libraries. The libraries can often be included or automatically installed via a packaging system. This makes binaries far easier to get running.

So what's the moral of the story? Package your binaries to meet the needs of the target audience, and package your source to meet the needs of its audience. Between these two, your customers (paying or not) will be far more pleased.

This accounts for its performances, but limits its portability...

yawn.. use bochs.. it's emulation, it's slow, but it's GPL.

• Interestingly enough, one of the first uses of this kind of virtualization was under IBMs OS/370, which is/was used on big mainframes. If you get the chance, Linux can run under (diagonally from) OS/370, so in theory you could get Win95 on a mainframe. (Gasp.. choke.. :)
  • 
    Most mainframes don't use x86, and so x86 virtualization is not an option for them.
    No, not x86 virt.. just the virtualization by means of command trapping and direct processor access...

Ah I had no idea, I don't use linux. C is portable though and I'm sure they could include x86 emulation. That'd be cool. Then again there's Bochs, a platform independant x86 emulator that can be found here.

What you want is already available in open source: bochs

Believe me, although it is impractical speed wise, I dearly wish Linux had a VMWare like product that attempted to EMULATE the microprocessor rather than attempting to run it in native mode. Apart from speed, there are cool things you can do with an emulated system, even if it is slow.

Well, now when I feel like emulating an x86 CPU on an X86 computer (yeah, rudundant but useful, kinda), now I can play my old DOS games. Woopee... (kinda)

DOSEmu uses the host processor rather than providing x86 emulation, and so is pretty fast (GP2 is only slightly slower under DOSEmu than it was under plain DOS on the same machine). Are you thinking of Bochs?

In any case, Plex86 will again use the host processor rather than emulate it. Speed should be pretty good.

I believe Plex86 has x86 emulation, so you can run x86 apps even if your box doesn't have an x86 CPU ... which I believe VMWare doesn't have ...

Wrong!, Plex86 will only feature x86 virtualisation, emulating an x86 on an x86 would be silly.

Howevever, the program Bochs (written by the plex86 author) has x86 emulation, but only parts of the bochs code will be used in plex86. In other words: if you want an x86 emulator, use Bochs. If you want virtualisation, use plex86 (when it gets usable) or buy VMware.

I'm wondering if anyone can comment on the performance of VMware (and the potential performance of plex86 one day). I used Bochs to run Windows 98, and the performance was awful. The specs on my machine are: AMD K6-2 450 MHz, 256 Mb RAM.
----

I can't find a link to prove it, but I'm pretty sure that the 700 Mhx chip had Windows-specific optimizations while the 400Mhz (while not specifically optimized for Linux) was intended for Linux use.

The "Windows-specific" optimizations (according to IEEE Spectrum is merely support for the 16-bit operations. Apparently (a) Windows still has a ton of 16-bit code in performance critical areas, and (b) nobody at Transmeta realised it before their first CPU (the article said they were pretty much all Unix heads).

I find it a little supprising that they didn't do a better job of checking the dyanmic instruction mix of popular OSes and applications (maybe using bochs) before spinning Si, but what the hell.

In any even the 400Mhz CPU will run Windows (or anything else a x86 CPU can run), and so can the 700Mhz chip. It's just when running Linux (or any all 32bit OS) more of hte transistors of the 700Mhz part will go to waste, and while running Windows the 400Mhz CPU will spend more time in the slow part of the emulator...

no one is going to be able to emulate a ps2 for some years to come

Then what's Bochs? Emulates IBM PS/2 computers quite nicely, useful for running older CPU-sensitive games.

Oh, you meant Sony's ps2. That's a different story entirely.

Of course when you do that, you you're stripping away "compile once run everywhere" and revealing Java for what it really is: a C++ wannabe.

Seriously, I think the idea of having platform independant VMs is cool, but why didn't they just write a VM and a C/C++ compiler for it? With stuff like Bochs out there, who needs Java? All it does is give you yet another codebase in yet another language. Feh!!!.

Sorry. Had to vent somewhere.

Another possible reason for the name change is because it sounds so similar to VMWare. To avoid legal problems in the future, they changed the name.

I should also mention that FreeMWare/plex86 is not a hardware emulator. It allows you to virtualize the x86 chip through software to run multiple operating systems on one CPU, even though the x86 architecture has no hardware virtualization. This is similar to what you can do on mainframes like the IBM S/390, although on a much smaller scale (I doubt anyone could run over 4,000 instances of Linux on an x86 chip).

It's actually explained right on their web site. "The goal of the FreeMWare project is to create an extensible open source PC virtualization software program which will allow PC and workstation users to run multiple operating systems concurrently on the same machine".

If you want hardware emulation, check out Bochs, which was written by one of the founding authors of FreeMWare/plex86.

Check out bochs. I haven't tried it in a while, but it might do what you need.

--

Actually, a friend of mine, who is working at IBM recently booted Windows 98 on the S/390. OK, he was using Bochs for Linux, but nevertheless it was Windows on the Dinosaur.

PS: He claimed to get 386 speed on a ten year old machine running not much more than bochs.

Vmware requires an intel CPU as it executes native x86 instructions, hence no vmware for the alpha! I would imagine the S/390 instruction set is no where close to the x86 instruction set ;)

However, that doesnt stop you from using multiple instances of an x86 emulator such as Bochs running simultaneously in multiple Linux systems on your S/390. Each of these could of course run Windows 9x/2000 or NT , but it would be doing so through software emulation of the x86 instruction set.

Don't throw away old x terminals, use them with Bochs and your S/390 to have 5000 copies of windows 2000 running as an x application throughout your company!

Or you could try Bochs Its slow but it works, even on non-Intel hardware

1. FreeMWare is virtualization, where the processor code is run natively (as just another process; for CPU techies, it's Ring 3) but the VM program modifies it so that Bad Stuff (tm), like executing privilaged instructions and reading stuff that con't be controlled, doesn't cause lots of s..t. Obviously this wouldn't work if the processor wasn't an x86. (Sorry, other replier) Now the different host architectures idea is theoretically possible. Bochs is currently working on something like this, where the code is run on a VM, but there is a little mini-virtualization process going on that translates x86 code into native processor code. This can be slow but if you cache the code right you can probably get near-VMWare speeds. I haven't checked how far along this is in development.
2. Argh! Information overload! Trace to every component in the system!?!? Obviously gotta restrict the devices or the time during which the tracing is performed or both. I think this would also slow things down significantly. What might help is a driver-level trace, i.e., everying that goes into a specific host device from the VM gets logged in some intelligible format. I can't really see how hardware developers could benefit from this, though.
3. MAJOR STABILITY ISSUE, depending on what you call direct access to a real piece of hardware. If you are going to let some foreign program access the interrupts, shared memory, DMAs, and all that stuff of a device, if the VM crashes it could bring the rest of the system with it. And guess which OS is the primary guest OS for VMWare/Linux, and thus FreeMWare? Exactly. And what do you mean by "host your host O/S? Reboot you VM!"? I don't get it.

Taling about a "bitchin' development environment": 95, 98, NT, 2000, Linux, *BSD, Be, and a few others, all running in VM's on a Linux host, plus MacOS, WinCE, TI-89 (never mind), etc. in virtualizing emulators. Auto cross-compile through virtualization and wrapper functions that get optimized away. Automatic duplication of test input data with compensation for OS-specific features to test for determinism. Use VNC to remotely control test machines on platforms you don't have VMs for. Auto-tgz or tar.bz2. Automatic snapshot every day, automated upload to web site. Debug automatically picks the host where the rest of the stuff gets in the way least and lets you debug that. Hardware I/O is logged intelligently so that only what you need to see is tracked. I'm sure other people have much better ideas, but that's mine.

Ken

Anyway, Bochs is not free software, in either the beer or speech sense. The "you can look at our code and send us suggested changes" reminds me more of the SCSL.

Bochs has been doing this since before vmware. It may not be GPL, but the source _is_ out, and the license allows modification.

Anyway, it seems the VMware people have patented some of their technology, so I hope the FreeMWare project doesn't run into any trouble there. I was unable to find out exactly what the patent was.

VMware isn't really an emulator; it's a program that virtualises the processor you already have (something like the trick IBM VM does on System/3[79]0s, and also similar to what Win3.1/95/98 do to allow you to run DOS programs), so you can run another x86 OS inside the OS you already run. Those virtualisation tricks also (IIRC) add a good amount of overhead to the system, so it slows it down, but the hit is a lot less than actually running a software emulator (though actually, I think certain peripherals like the VGA may be emulated).

If you're looking for something that *does* run on non-PC hardware, you may want to check out Bochs, though like any software emulation, that's very slow unless your machine's own CPU is very fast. Also, the guy behind Bochs is also organising his own "freemware" project, which is basically a Open Source clone of VMware.

-lee

You might look at Bochs, which is an open sourced x86 emulator that should work on PPC (it works on Sparc). It isn't the fastest thing in the world, but it is supposed to be able to run Windows 9x and a lot of Windows software.

You can find the bochs home page at:

http://www.bochs.com

whatever happened to bochs?

Looks like it is alive and well. Apparently it can run Windows 9x and a fair amount of Windows software these days given a fast enough CPU.

The Bochs homepage can be found at:

http://www.bochs.com

If it is not going to be free software, why would anyone want to help for free?

Bochs is similar in concept to this...an x86 emulator. One cool thing about Bochs is that it doesn't use any assembly code, so you can compile it on pretty much anything (I think i'll try it out on the UltraSparcs on campus some time). But that also means it's kind of slow (okay, a lot slow). Buuuut, "they" are working on dynamic translation, and premliminary tests show an increase in speed of several orders of magnitude (and that's just optimizing three instructions!). One other cool thing that i've noticed with bochs is that you can use your own VGA and BIOS ROM images...woowoo.

see bochs It booted lose95 last time I checked. Might even be useful for you. I'm sure there are others.

bluGill, I don't feel like loging in now.