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VMware vs Virtual PC vs Bochs
Sean writes "Possibly of great interest to developers as well as alternative OS users, this article compares three x86 emulators, VMWare, VirtualPC and Bochs. It looks like VMWare is better than the lot, but Bochs is shaping up nicely too."
Okay, I think this would be obvious, but maybe it isn't to most people. Why would you compare the OS emulators to other emulators? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the emulator to the actual OS in which it is attempting to emulate?
You'll note that he's using it on a dual celeron 533, which isn't exactally the speediest thing out there. Also, jsut to state the obvious, this means he's running this on x86, which isn't where most of VirtualPC's user base is.
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He's comparing three completely different products as if they were similar.
I took a class last fall that required us to do some fairly intrusive kernel hacking in Linux using VMWare. It served that purpose fairly well; it was nice to be able to accidently fsck up your entire filesystem (no pun intended) without having to worry about losing your work. The only problem we had was that it absolutely refused to maintain the correct time.
I also used it when I was messing with Linux From Scratch, so I could see how it worked before trying to install it on actual hardware. That's what I still use VMWare for; doing test runs of risky software.
VirtualPC is a Macintosh program for people who need to run the occasional Windoze program. I don't know why they even bothered with a PC version. I also don't know why they compare it to VMWare.
I'm not familiar with Bochs, but it sounds to me like several layers of abstraction on the VMWare model. So of course it's slow. That's what layers of abstraction do!
So I'm not quite sure what the point of this article was. Someone want to fill me in?
What happened to http://www.netraverse.com win4lin? I havn't used VMWare in about a year, but about a year ago I compared the usability of vmware and win4lin.
Win4lin is quite impressive, and quite stable. Win4lin apparently took a number of "shortcuts" and broke some rules, which VMWare did not. Making VMWare's product more universal, and flexible. Win4lin *only* supports win98, and cannot boot any other operating system. Win4lin needs serious kernel patches aswell. VMWare can run under linux, and boot linux, win4lin cannot. VMWare is also available under windows.
Although I generally tend to side with designs which are more flexible and portable, the performance and responsiveness of win4lin are quite impressive. As a user, win4lin has been what's been running on my desktop for over a year Weather win4lin will be able to "adapt" their product to run winXP or 2000, remains to be seen; I don't know how much they're tied directly to win98. I have recently heard that they have a version of of win4lin which can run WinME, which is very simular to win98.
Wasn`t there a version of VirtualPC for running RedHat a while ago?
Why doesn`t someone create a clone of em86 for ppc/linux, and possibly run ppc/linux under a virtual machine in OSX (ppc cpu`s are designed to be able to virtualize themselves.. unlike x86)
The whole system would be far more performant if 90% of it were ppc native, and only a small subset of applications which are only available as binaries, were running under emulation, and it would show up a major disadvantage of closed source software.
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What about user-mode-linux?
"User-Mode Linux is a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes. Run buggy software, experiment with new Linux kernels or distributions, and poke around in the internals of Linux, all without risking your main Linux setup.
User-Mode Linux gives you a virtual machine that may have more hardware and software virtual resources than your actual, physical computer. Disk storage for the virtual machine is entirely contained inside a single file on your physical machine. You can assign your virtual machine only the hardware access you want it to have. With properly limited access, nothing you do on the virtual machine can change or damage your real computer, or its software. "
get it at http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net
or apt-get install user-mode-linux
If you have a fast enough cpu, a 2gh+ machine, sound works alot better. On my dual 800, sound was ok, but did skip. On my amd 1800, i can watch dvds, mp3s, and play mpegs with no sound or video skipping. I also used the newest emu10k1 drivers. Of course pre-empt and a gig of ram didnt hurt either. (-;
/mnt/games/jediknight2; winex JEDIOUTCAST.EXE
Screenshot. http://www.ironwolve.com/desktop.jpg
Only thing left is to get AA fonts working with IceWM, and the side buttons working on my explorer mouse.
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As an OS developer I have actually embraced Bochs as a wonderful solution, and it was the most important tool that recently allowed me to write a simple multitasking kernel in under two weeks worth of spare time.
However, I just wish they'd be more responsive to bug reports. A problem I reported back while I was working on that kernel has just been ignored; in the end I worked around it (a different implementation prevented the problem that caused it from occurring), but I still wish they'd just read the report, which I'm sure included more than enough information for someone who's even only remotely familiar with the code to fix the problem in a couple of minutes.