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FreeMWare Renamed 'plex86'
Joey Lawrance writes, "FreeMWare, the LGPL'd replacement for VMWare, has a new name: plex86. From their site: 'The new name "plex86" is derived from the (pseudo)words multiplex and x86. Many users had requested a new name; one that is short, easy to remember, and directly relates to the function of the software.'" It's been less than a year since FreeMWare's first mention on Slashdot; looks like they've made great progress since then in creating a free/Free multi-OS platform. If you're interested in contributing (including documentation), they're looking for you.
A technical question: will these OSes run under dosemu? AFAIK, they're real-mode OSes, and thus should run in a hardware 'virtual x86' on a 386 or higher. Has anybody tried them? What about Xenix or other ancient real-mode Unices?
How can you mistype 86? Haven't you had enough practice with {vi,emacs,ed} /etc/X11/XF86Config? :-)
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
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Sure, these GNU tools are nice, and this is exactly the kind of area where open source works like a charm. However, I don't think they're on par with the likes of VMware, in terms of complexity, development time, and the like.
GNU tools outshine their propietary cousins precisely because there simply isn't a significant paying market for them (even though combined they're extremely usefull, few are going to go out and spend a great deal on money on individual tools (and they're certainly not going to upgrade on a regular basis)) None the less, the development on these particular tools was not rapid, nor was it particularly innovative. Quite the oppositite, in fact, these tools developed slowly, but continuously, absorbing many different points of flexibility as users modified them to fit their needs (an area which propietary products may never quite be able to hit). Most of these modifications were not ingenious by any means [nor were they the result of a SINGLE driving focus, like what is necessary to create products such as VMware]...Because they evolved so slowly, with so many interests in mind, they become highly versatile and very stable.
As it stands right now, you have two mostly distinct groups of software. The first group is rapidly evolving and highly complex projects. The second being, slower moving and smaller projects. Open source has yet to touch the first, but does very well in the second.
When, and if, the software industry ever slows down (e.g., fewer feature sets required, less bloat, Open Source efforts like this might become appropriate for an even wider array of applications and operating systems (e.g., the 'first' group). But until that time, I just don't think Open Source will ever keep pace in #1.
If anyone has seen Mendel Rosenblum's (main guy behind VMWare and also a Stanford grad) Stanford lecture on VMWare you'd have to agree that he acted little like a scrouge. He wouldn't even answer some simple questions by saying: "Ooooo... I can't tell you that... we spent a lot of time thinking about that and I don't wanna give it away" etc...
In any case... FreeMWare (now Plex86) will rock.. I tried some dev code and it's a great start. Give it another 6-8 months and it'll be competitive with VMWare.
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Is anyone here actually using FreeMWare/plex86? How well does it work at the moment?
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
This didn't apply to unix and GNU/Linux, did it?
Something like plex86 should be simpler than GNU/Linux. Its job is much more specific - working round a few inadequacies in the x86 architecture, rather than writing a whole operating system and applications from the ground up.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
plex86.com would be a blatant misuse of the .com suffix. That indicates a commerical site. plex86, however, is free software.
Great, now Plextor (The undisputed king of SCSI cdroms) will sue their asses off ;)
Actually, the real reason they changed the name is so they wouldn't have to put up with the crap in the comp.emulators.freemware newsgroup with fools who think it is another WAREZ emulator group.
Let's take a look at recent posts in the group.
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Yes, that's right 5 out of 6 posts are general spam, and the other post is a WAREZ rom site.
hmm...-----Transmission Complete----- If you want to email me...Don't
it seems whenever anyone talks to much about "what should we call it", like bands or people doing software projects they're really thinking about their interview with Lary King, not making great software.
call me an asshole, it's just something i've noticed. i say less bullshit, more code.
-Jon
this is my sig.
LyX has *no* comparable proprietary product. For that matter, I can't think
of one for TeX, either (LyX uses LaTeX to print. It is *not* a front end
for LaTeX [anymore].)
Oh, wait; there are a couple of commercial knock-offs, but Scientific
Word and the other one are years behind LyX in usability and function.
If you need to
a) write your equation without reaching for the mouse
b) be able to edit from the keyboard, and
c) see your equation displayed
LyX *is* the leading edge. (Note: older versions of Word on the Mac,
1.0-5.1, could do a&b, or c, but not all three at the same time)
And as for speed? There was a feature I used regularly in word (insert a single character of greek/symbol) that wasn't in lyx. I mentioned it on the developer's list. Within a week it was part of the main code base. This was about four years ago--around the same time that this feature became awkward to use on Word . . .
The name change seems to be intended to differentiate itself from VMware. FreeMWare is just too close and sounds like the cheap ripoff of a better product.
See the linux.com interview for more on the topic.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Anyone know the difference between the way these two programs work? I think VMWare has a patent out on its method of executing two operating systems... anyone know what the details are for sure?
Then came Transmeta and Crusoe. This CPU has "hardware" just in time compilation of X86 code, which means that the cpu compiles the x86 code to Crusoe native code before executing, and saves the compiled code in a cache. The cpu discards old compiled code in the cache, which stops the cache from growing beyond limits.
These techniques could be combined, by doing jit compiling of x86 code to x86 code (ie. coping the code to a cache and adding breakpoints to the compiler at every instruction which isn't compiled before or discarded from the cache). This is fast, since no "real" compilation is necessary. On the Crusoe the compilation is much harder since you compile to another instruction set. If this is possible, running a guest OS on a linux machine should be very fast and smooth, and all this could be done in user mode, without kernel support. As more of the guest os code is "compiled", we could discard (or page out) the "interpreted" code (the original os code) thus saving memory for the cache. The memory usage of vmware has disappointed more than one user.
RFC1925
I see too much bytching going on here. 'plex86' is a fine name for the project. It's a virtualizer that lets you run several concurrent copies of the OS, each thinking it has it's own 80x86 processor. Lets play the name game until we get something short and unique!!
Several concurrent copies of 80x86 OS.
Multiple copies of 80x86 OS
Multiple 80x86 OS
Multiple x86 OS
multiple x86
multiplex86
plex86
Good enough!
.sig: Now legally binding!
The GNU tools, such as the file utilities, grep, sed, and so on, have long been better than the tools supplied with most vendors' Unices. Tests show that they simply work better. (In fact, those particular tests, in which various vendors' utilities crashed when fed random input, have been mentioned before on Slashdot.)
I now consider Linux to be better than proprietary Unix simply because it comes with the GNU tools. For example, we recently acquired a Sun box which was essentially unusable until we wasted a large amount of time replacing many of the utilities with their GNU equivalents.
That's a desperation approach because the hardware is broken. AMD and Intel should be pushed towards fixing the few hardware problems that require this hack. This will eliminate the need for scanning, breakpointing, and emulating in a hypervisor, which will make such programs much, much simpler and cleaner. IBM has had this right on their mainframes since System/370, and it's extremely useful in the mainframe world. You really can run VM under VM under VM. Better, you can run the stuff that's not trusted in a separate virtual machine, where it can't do too much.
The
new name "plex86" is derived from the (pseudo)words multiplex and x86. Many
users had requested a new name; one that is short, easy to remember, and
directly relates to the function of the software.
From what I see, plex86 (flex your muscles?) seems less easier to remember than FreeMWare. Also, since this software is supposed to be a hardware emulator, why slap the 86 across it? I'm pretty sure the alpha ppl would get this working on their boxes soon enough, not to mention the PPC dudes.
--
We all know the _real_ question here:
Is plex86 is easier to say than VMWare?
plex-eight-e-six = 4 syllables
V-M-Ware = 3 syllables
followed by the tongue-twister-test:
Be scared and beware VMWare's fare.
Rexx and Beck's plex86 flex best.
No contest - plex86 is harder to say. Harder to type? Hmm..a closer call.
plex86 - mostly lowercase letters, but the numerics on the end complicate matters. plex876 plex86 plex86 plex76
VMWare - All letters, but the change in case (though in two sections), makes it harder to type. VMWare VMware VMWare VMware
Too close to call, obviously.
--Conclusion--
Well, VMWare has it, by virtue of being easier to pronounce.
Of course, the actual question was is it easier to remember? Is what easier to remember? If you're not going to make sense I'm going home *slam*
I've a friend who went for some job interviews with VMWare, and believe it or not, VMWare is actually making a profit, a rare accomplishment in this dot-com world.
Did these guys really do their research before renaming themselves? Ericsson already has a programming language called "Plex" (used on their AXE exchange switches). I expect they own the trademark (etc) on it too; although I don't know for sure. Anyway - you'd have to expect problems in the future. Poor choice by the FreeMWare guys.
Actually, according to someone I know who was an intellectual property lawyer, numbers, while not registerable as trademarks in themselves, are sufficient to cause conflict between one company's trademark and another's in the same area of business. E.g., if I have a car called the "Bob 9-3", Saab may be able to claim (at least in the US) that it infringes on the registered trademark "Saab 9-3". In fact[IANAL&TIAUA (I am not a lawyer, and this is an unverified anecdote.)]:
It seems that when IBM changed the name of the System/3 family to AS/400, they had to pay an undisclosed sum to the current sole holder of a registered trademark consisting of a sequence of letters followed by the digits 400, used to refer to automatic data processing equipment. Care to guess what "automatic data processing equipment" they were talking about?
The Atari 400.
How's that for funny?
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
How many would you like? It all depends on your definition of rapid really. Open Source software doesn't reach user-level release as fast as commercial software, but it becomes feature-comparable much earlier and useable by those willing to get their hands dirty _far_ faster.
In terms of quality products, it is hard to deny software such as PHP, Apache, The linux kernel, perl, yadda yadda, all the usual stuff. However none of these can really be considered "rapid" from start, they all started quite some time ago.
Most really rapid initial Open Source development can never be quoted, since it usually consists of a large number of developers abandoning a previous implementation and starting again from scratch. Much of the good Open Source software you see now has gone through at least one phase of being heavily re-written, almost or sometimes literally from the ground up, in an astounding amount of time, but because nobody clocked it, or changed the name, it just turns up as the latest release.
However I think there are some, smaller, cases of applications that appears almost from nowhere. The various linux napster clients for instance. One moment I had just heard of napster, the next their protocol was reverse engineered and two or three Open Source versions of the client appeared.
Similarly with email software. Sendmail, king of the hill for so long now, was looking pretty much invincible, then qmail came out, and suddenly what had looked like something that was good enough seemed somehow tarnished. No dust on Sendmail, I use it, and love it, but many don't, and a slew of new email servers have appeared recently, qmail and exim being two of the notable mentions.
I am unwilling to stand up and say "Look, under any circumstances, Open Source software will develop a complete application faster than a Commercial method would", for a start there are different levels of interest in various types of applications, and for second, theres a mindhsare capture thing. Commercial places just hire their employees, Open Source projects have to attract their developers, and that takes a bit of time, especially as you have to get exponentially more than those of a commercial project in order to make up for the (at least inital) fact that nobody is working on it full time.
However I think that Apache, PHP, Linux and many others are undeniable proof that once that mindshare of developers is attained, development is unbelievably fast. Just watching the kernel mailing list for a week is enough to make one dizzy, and you don't see a 10th of what is going on.
When I was doing one of my own projects, I really noticed that speed-up effect after the initial block was over. TDT took two weeks to get to something vaguely working, another one to get to something that looked fairly ok and had the major engine working, and then within a week enormous improvements were made, contributions even by the few people who were interested in it made a huge difference, lighting, explosions, tuning of coloring, models, rewrites of parts of the engine to support effects like waves and menus, I was making releases less than hourly on the evenings I was working on it.
I don't think we have yet seen the true power of the Open Source development method, but places like Source Forge and tools like CVS and autoconf are slowly pushing their way into the fore, making things go quicker and quicker and quicker. I look forward to the future.
You can't win a fight.
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.