plex86 ported to NetBSD/i386

hubertf writes "plex86 is now works on a second Open Source operating system. So far plex86 only supported Linux as host platform, and thanks to Frank van der Linden of Wasabi Systems, it now also works on the i386 port of the NetBSD multi-platform operating system. Tested operating systems include FreeDOS beta 4, MS-DOS 6.22, Red Hat 6 Linux and NetBSD 1.5. See the NetBSD site for more information.

Comments

Re:What about Darwin?

[israfil_kamana]

Plex86 is a virtualization system, not a full emulation system (or at least it contains an emulation system, but the point is virtualization.)

The point of this is that instructions do not have to be emulated because an x86 instruction on FreeBSD, say, is the same machine code instruction on Windows. It's the APIs that are different. So rather than emulating hardware, Plex86 "passes-through" the machine instructions to the hardware unchanged, achieving very low drag on performance.

So what you want is Bochs, pure and simple. I do hope that Bochs development doesn't permanently stall now that it's creator is working on Plex86. It's a good product, and frankly, I'd love to run x86 apps on OpenBSD on an Alpha. ;)

VMWare will almost certainly port their stuff to the MacOSX, though probably not Darwin. I'll bet that Bochs is ported to Darwin soon, as it runs on three other BSD's