Review Of Serenity Virtual Station

JigSaw writes "Here's some serious competition for VMWare and Virtual PC: OSNews reviews a new OS emulator, the Serenity Virtual Station, which can run as a host on FreeBSD, Linux and OS/2 and supports as guests a slew of OSes. It is based on the twoOStwo virtual operating engine (which additonally runs on top of Windows as well)."

Comments

Requires a Kernel Mod?

[KrispyKringle]

That's odd. Admittedly, it's not unheard of (UML requires a kernel module, but then it's not a hardware emulator, either). But you'd think if it runs with host OSes of FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, and OS/2, it wouldn't rely on anything needing a kernel module; I have no idea how one gains that functionality in Windows or OS/2 (though perhaps this is easier than I am guessing). And I can't help but wonder, then, whether it does hardware emulation in the vein of Bochs, or system call translations in the vein of Qemu. I suppose it's a fair guess that it's the latter, though, since it appears to be x86 only (no mention of support for OSX, which should be easy enough if FreeBSD is supported).

Ah, well. Trust OS News to be short on technical details. Or even on proper grammar.

Re:Requires a Kernel Mod?

[rusty0101]

As far as adding the required functionality to OS/2, Serenity can do that directly, as they are the current developers and distributors of the current implementation of OS/2, aka E-CommStation.

I think the support would be added to Windows via a .vxd driver, running in ring 0 on the processor.

The author indicates that the Beta responsiveness is comparable to VMWare, which suggests that it is using some form of providing access to the hardware, rather than emulating hardware in software.

As a point of recall, OS/2 has x86 virtualization already built in, which allowed users to run dos and win3.0 applications in their own seprate processor spaces.

Then again, I'm not currently developing emulators for any platform, so what do I know.

-Rusty

Re:Why people stay on Windows

[KrispyKringle]

VMWare is the most popular commercial one (for Linux and Windows; VirtualPC would be the one to try on Apple--unless you just want to emulate PPC on PPC, i.e. run OSX on PPC Linux, in which case Mac On L inux is for you). Bochs is the leading open source contendor, in that it emulates a complete x86 machine, and works on any architecture (SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, etc). However, because of that, it's quite slow, and is far more useful for things like reverse engineering or OS testing than actual desktop use (i.e., if you wan't to see registers in use, it'd be great; if you want to watch a movie or use Photoshop, don't bother). And of course, there's always WINE, which runs a number of Windows programs on Linux quite well.

Re:Free?

[jlp2097]

Yes, there is Bochs, which is able to run Windows 2000, Windows 95 and a lot of Unices. It is an x86 emulator and according to their own FAQ pretty slow. But if you just want to run some programs from time to time - there you go.
HTH

Re:Why people stay on Windows

[Joe Tie.]

You might try crossover too. I havn't tried it myself, but there's been some good reviews of its support for photoshop in linux.

Re:Denial of OS

[TheRaven64]

Yes, we can. It's called a microkernel. The most popular one is Mach, which typically runs a version of BSD as a userspace process in which programs are run.

Re:VMWare Price Drop

[Wudbaer]

More the heat from Microsoft's (ex Connectix) virtual PC which was originally planned to be cheaper than VMWare Workstation while offering similar features (at least on Windows) (which cannot honestly said for the Open Source ones, or noone would buy either VMWare or Virtual PC anymore).

In any case it's great it has become less expensive as VMWare Workstation really is a great product.

Re:PowerPC version of Virtual Machine?

[rogabean]

from the Mac-on-Linux site:

Mar 21, 2004 Mac-on-Linux 0.9.70 is out!

It is here, finally! Some highlights:

Support for CD burners
Generic USB support
Generic SCSI support
Sound driver rewrite (and ALSA support)
Networking improvements
Reduced latency
Mac OS X 10.3 acceleration
Performance enhancements
Various bug-fixes
Support for the 2.6 kernel
Debugger improvements
Misc improvements for SMP systems
A lot of other minor modifications

Technical highlights
THIS LINE-->>> Arch separation (yes... mol will soon run under OS X)
Reworked kernel API
New build system

So keep your eye open. ;)

Re:Why people stay on Windows

[cubic6]

Yeah, the review doesn't seem to show any marked advantages over VMware. Unless they sell it for $20 or give away the Linux version, I don't see them stealing any of VMware's market share.