Slashdot Mirror

Like ReactOS... it's a hobby project. A huge one with thousands of developers, but a hobby project.

You are greatly overestimating the number of contributors to ReactOS. They have 38 contributors with more than 100 commits and only 55 with more than 10.

The effort would be so much better off elsewhere (e.g. an open-source VMWare that does half what VMWare can do in terms of desktop integration!),

You mean like the open-source VirtualBox and QEmu?

But no virtual machine technology is going to solve our societies utter dependency on Windows. Take away Windows and everything grinds to a halt: no more loan at your bank because the software for that runs on Windows, half the ATMs down, gas pumps too, cashiers at a significant fraction of the supermarkets revert to paper, and in a number of states no election anymore, etc.

And yet there is only one supplier. That would be totally unimaginable for oil, steel or most other critical resources. That's what makes Wine important: it is the only alternative Windows API implementation.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "VT" -- do you mean Intel's VT-x?

It's probably best to let the Xen folks explain far better than I could hope to.

Quemu has their own explanation (and I think KVM is included in the explanation)

I get the feeling that the virtualization instructions (VT-x, AMD-V, and whatever the equivalents are on s390, ARM, and POWER) aren't really involved with either Spectre or Meltdown.

I wonder about SPARC, but given Oracle & Fujitsu appear to be killing SPARC... it probably doesn't matter.

How does this project compare to the existing machine code compilers, namely Valgrind's VEX library and Qemu's tiny code generator (https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/TCG)?

Those sorts of people should just install one of the free VM products (QEMU (linux) Virtual PC (Windows)) available for their machine, install the os and only use it when required. There are also a few paid ones available. Do this would provide a greater level of security.

ranks of people holding on to WinXP virtual machines

It's not quite so bad as you think, then :)

Those sorts of people should just install one of the free VM products (QEMU (linux) Virtual PC (Windows)) available for their machine, install the os and only use it when required.
There are also a few paid ones available.
Do this would provide a greater level of security.

I wonder if FreeDOS can run in virtual machine. Oh Google...

Yes, you can run FreeDOS in a VM! I usually recommend installing FreeDOS in a VM, especially if you don't plan to commit that computer to FreeDOS full-time. For Windows, I think most people prefer QEMU or VMWare or VirtualPC. On my Linux laptop, I run DOSemu.

...what we need is a "Win9X Box" that will simulate say a 733MHz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and a Geforce 4 that will fake all the quirks that devs would use back then.

For 3D-accelerated games from that era, I've had good luck with dgVoodoo. Unaccelerated DirectDraw stuff often flat refuses to run on newer versions of Windows, but I've gotten some things to work with The DirectDraw Hack and similar programs, depending on the game.

But, that's not really what you're asking for. QEMU might be a good starting point; getting it to emulate a P3 and a Geforce 4 may be a lot of work (I haven't perused the source), but probably not impossible; I mean, it's designed to emulate selected CPUs and video cards already.

WINE is getting good, too -- I want to try this when it's working.

http://wiki.qemu.org/Links#GUI_Front_Ends

QEMU comes in mind. Oh, there a nice comparison chart at Wikipedia.

Last time I checked the emulator for Android was just qemu. If you don't know what you're talking about, look it up.

Try QEMU and talk to the digital preservation community

Won't BOCHS and QEMU work* regardless of host architecture.

*By "work" I mean run the apps... I know they're both fairly slow compared to native apps. However, they could be made faster by only emulating the app and allowing the WinApi calls to be thunked to native calls.

Any OS runs on Linux with http://qemu.org/ :)

Then there's the reason to run Windows at all - the 3rd party apps that are x86 only (many are not even x86_64 yet) and they won't run either.

The solution to this is something like Qemu's user mode emulation. For those that don't know it will emulate a different processor for the binary, but syscalls are made using native system code.

The Apple approach is actually quite good here, provide emulation support for a while until everybody has time to migrate to native applications. I don't know the details of Apple's emulation, perhaps they are doing something similar to Qemu's User Mode.

-Mysteryvortex

So, back to qemu then?

yep - Virtualbox uses QEMU if Vt-x or AMD-V isn't present. I've got a year old Quad-Core 8400 that doesn't support Vt-x because Intel doesn't include it in consumer grade chips (I made sure my laptop had it, though). I think this is going to bite Intel's ass just like the Intel GMA graphics thing did when they used a software timer and Vista Aero required a hardware timer.

Your main point is dead on, but there are a few other projects working on open-source compilers; off the top of my head I know of:

TCC, written by the guy who created QEMU
BCC, "Bruce's C Compiler", which spits out 16-bit code (for embedded machines?)
OpenWatcom C compiler which is only for OS/2, DOS and Win32, but they're porting it to *nix Real Soon Now.

There's also one I'm forgetting which has been talked about in the OpenBSD mailing list as a free alternative to GCC; but I forget the name of it.

But, what sucks very much is that the last Win4Lin kernel I can use is mated to 2.6.8, and that means I cannot run it in Mandriva 2007 Free, which uses 2.6.17

Isn't win4lin basically just qemu + kqemu? Can you not just download the relevant versions of the two packages from the qemu home page, http://www.qemu.org/ and compile them for whatever kernel you want?
./configure; make; make install

But I admit I have no idea if there was a version of kqemu that properly supported Win98. But then again, do you really need kqemu? If "Lotus SmartSuite" did run on 10x slower machines back in the days when Win98 was fresh, I don't see why it wouldn't be "snappy" enough under regular qemu on a modern machine.

User-mode Linux? I've never used Xen in my life – never had any reason for it, and honestly it looks like too much effort for what I'd need it for – but I use user-mode Linux literally every day. Not only is it hosting my Web site (which is actually the reason I've gotten addicted to it), but I've also been using it for software development right on my own machine – since the only machine I have that's suitable for intensive dev stuff is my AMD64, I've set the thing up to run the '64 version natively, and then most of the 32-bit work is done on user-mode. And the nice thing is, it doesn't require any changes to the host kernel, and except for a few special tools for networking, etc., everything you need is right in the kernel source itself.

While I'm on the topic, it's not exactly a virtualization program, but QEMU is also very handy; I tend to use it quite a bit for torture testing new releases, and it's also useful if a certain program won't compile on the user-mode installation because it needs low-level kernel stuff, full POSIX threads support, etc. Even without the KQEMU module it's still faster than the Duron-700/256MB I'd been using before, and considerably more convenient as well.

Anyway, just thought I'd point out that there are other technologies, and other applications as well – servers aren't the only things which benefit from this stuff!

Crosstool – haven't used it too extensively myself, but it did a great job when I had to cross-compile a Linux kernel to run on my AMD64 system. And if you're using ARM or similar architectures, QEMU might be helpful. I may be entirely missing the point here, but may as well offer my own limited knowledge anyway :-)

This is just a very first test on universal binaries for Q. Expect flaws! No virtualization yet, but it's way faster than on PPC never the less.

The guys working on Q are working towards a virtualized environment.

The current version is an emulated environment based on QEMU. It's quite fast, but they have stated in the forums that they are working on a virtualizer kernel extension that will run at near native speeds (like VMWare does.)

For the work that I'm doing, it's VERY handy to have a copy of Windows 2000 Pro running IE 5, 5.5 and 6 on the Intel iMac. There are still rough edges during the install, but it's definitely a great piece of software with a very promising future.

-ch

Unless there's something I'm not aware of, you aren't using Kqemu on OpenBSD. ;)

I think I was quite clear in my post, actually:

>a) This free runtime would suck because it doesn't run a Plan 9 vm.

No, this no-cost (NOT 'free') runtime is less than optimal because it does not support older virtual machines which you can find out on the internet (Plan 9 was only an example; but basically VMWare 5 often has problems with running virtual OS installs created by older versions of VMWare)

>b) Since you guess VMware doesn't support freebsd, you recommend Qemu to run linux, freebsd and win*.

Since VMWare does not build a native binary for any platform other than Linux and Windows, I recommend using software which does run on other platforms (at least until the unlikely day I can download a native binary for FreeBSD which will run without Linux emulation) so that you have Virtual Machines which are ready to go in the event you install NetBSD or OSX or whatever.

Still, in the time between QEMU catches up to VMWare feature-wise it's nice to have a legal-but-hobbled copy.

However, given the compatibility problems with previous versions of VMWare I am not sure how much use it will be to people who download Open Source VMs off of the web to run (and I assume that's part of who this is aimed at). I've read a couple of places, for instance, that the current version of VMWare won't run the VMWare installation of Plan 9 that you can download from Bell Labs.

That said, you can run Qemu with kernel acceleration on Linux, FreeBSD (a platform VMWare doesn't even support) and 2000/XP and get pretty good performance - and it's probably a better option than a mere 'runtime' given that not only does it support an additional platform (FreeBSD), but you can create a VM on one platform and run it on all the others (even ones w/out accerlation, such as NetBSD -though you really would not want to).

Intel outperforming PowerPC was kind of expected. However I am impressed with a technology behind Rosetta. Are ther any open source projects like that?

QEMU aims to do the same:

EMU is a generic and open source processor emulator which achieves a good emulation speed by using dynamic translation.

It can run (to some degree; it's still in development) on x86, amd64, PowerPC and a host of other CPUs, and it can run binary code for x86, amd64, PowerPC, SPARC, ARM, and MIPS.

> Did it ever occur to anyone that I might want to get an emulator/hypervisor to run Windows

Sure, the thought occurred and it's a really nice thing to have. It's just not what Xen is for.

I always tell people who want to run Windows in a virtual machine on vanilla x86 - and do so with high perfomance - just buy VMWare. If you really want a free VM system then try out http://www.qemu.org/. It's very impressive, just not as fast.

> No matter how you slice it Xen's "paravirtualization", if such a term even existed prior to Xen, only does half the job.

(aside: the term was used by the Denali VMM. It may have also been used by IBM for their hypervisors - it certainly has been used by them since)

It does a different job, that's all: the job is to run high performance full-featured virtual machines on vanilla x86 hardware. It's not for running Windows on Linux.

The team are aware that Windows support is important in the enterprise, which is why on machines with hw assist (which the MS hypervisor will require anyhow), Xen will do full virtualisation. AMD and Intel are writing the code for this themselves.

On machines without hw assist, you gotta buy VMWare or use QEmu. It's not ideal, it's just the practical route forward.

qemu - the free as in beer emulator

http://www.qemu.org/

...and performs a bit better than Bochs. Install a smallish distro like Crux. QEMU also is supposed to support Windows 95/98/ME/2K but Bochs will probably prove to be more compatible. Don't expect speed demon performance and you'll be OK.

AC

If you want a real Open Source emulator that's complete enough to run Windows XP (and do so with usable speed), QEmu is your only option. Currently it simulates a Pentium, Vesa fgramebuffer video card, and ISA NE2000 NIC.

Check out this dude's blog for screenshots of QEmu running Win2K.

Combine it with a copy of x86 glibc and a recent Crossover, you can use it to run Office XP for Windows on Linux on a Mac. Scary :^).

Go get it from the Qemu Site.