QEMU Accelerator Achieves Near-Native Performance

An anonymous reader writes "QEMU is a generic and open source processor emulator which achieves a good emulation speed by using dynamic translation. Its sporting a new module called the 'Accelerator' which can achieve near native speeds, and currently runs on Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels. This means you could theoretically run Windows (or another OS) on a Linux machine at near native speeds without buying a commercial emulator. The catch is that although QEMU is released under various open source licenses, the Accelerator uses a free (as in beer) license because the module is a 'closed source proprietary product.' Fabrice Bellard does mention that he would consider open sourcing the Accelerator under certain conditions."

Comments

Money?

[cronius]

Open Sourcing the QEMU Accelerator Technology ?
As a supporter of open source, the author accepts to open source the QEMU Accelerator Technology provided a company invests enough money to support the project and to recompense the author from the potential loss of revenue. Interested companies can look at the roadmap and make suggestions to the author.

If it actually achieves near-native performance right now, how much better can it get? And since it's already gratis, would anyone want to pay for one that achives actual native performance?

I don't think there's much money up for grabs here, to be honest. But that depends on how good it really is right now.

Dual licence ?

[Alain Williams]

Why not release under a dual licence as mysql have done ... they seem to rake in money while giving the product away. Yes: most people will have it for free, but some will want to pay (to include in a proprietary bundle/...) - the extra market/awareness that open sourcing it will bring will mean that he will get a slice of a larger cake.

Re:Dual licence ?

[fabu10u$]

Especially because with enough performance this is a good candidate for embedding in a commercial product, i.e. if your code is really tied to a specific architecture you could "port" by wrapping QEMU around it.

The ignorant laugh

[fm6]

Ha ha. The point is not just that you emulate the processor, but that you emulate the complete environment. In theory, you can do this without processor emulation using the Virtual Machine Monitor feature in IA-32 chips. Unfortunately, nobody except VMWare has figured out how to do this well enough to support guest OSs reliably.

I sometimes want to play old DOS games on my P3 machine. A lot of these games work in Real Mode, period. And they often can't do sound except on specific sound cards. I can:

• Get a second machine for game playing. I don't spend that much time playing games. At least I hope not...
• Reboot to DOS every time I want to run a game. Inconvenient, and the sound doesn't always work.
• Fire up VMWare. Except I can't afford a copy right now...
• Run DOSBox, which emulates not only a 286-class processor, but other legacy hardware such as sound cards and Hercules Graphics.

DOSBox is a really impressive bit of software, but it demands a lot of cycles to get the job done. (Typically, 75% of the CPU time on my P3 when I do VGA games full screen. Playing in a window is impossible unless I step down the color depth of my display.) So it's not good for much except real- and protected-mode games. An open-source emulator that doesn't have that kind of overhead would be very useful.

he's probably best off just releasing it

[idlake]

The author writes:

As a supporter of open source, the author accepts to open source the QEMU Accelerator Technology provided a company invests enough money to support the project and to recompense the author from the potential loss of revenue. Interested companies can look at the roadmap and make suggestions to the author.

What matters isn't really the potential loss of revenue, but the expected loss of revenue, i.e., large amount of money multiplied by the low probability of actually succeeding.

I'm sure the accelerator is skillfully written, but I think chances of turning QEMU+Accelerator into something commercially successful are next to nil. Why? Foremost because the market already has VirtualPC and VMware in it, created and maintained by big companies with deep pockets, lots of lawyers, and large patent portfolios. Oh, and then there are coLinux, Xen, and UML that he would be competing with as well.

To compete, he'd have to get startup funding, a management team, developers, support, and, worst of all, sales people: a lot of work, a lot of money, and next to impossible if you don't either get a lot of buzz or know the right people. Then he'd have to develop a product; a product isn't just a working piece of code, it's documentation, training, tutorials, travel, presentations. People don't expect that from FOSS, but they do expect it as soon as they pay a couple of bucks for something. Even if he does all that, the most likely outcome is still that the startup fails. But even if it succeeded, he would probably only end up with a small slice of a moderately successful company (competition and all that), and only after spending several years of his life doing things he probably doesn't enjoy.

I think people underestimate how hard it is to commercialize something, even something that is really good and novel (his software may be really good, but it isn't novel).

I think his best bet would be release it under a dual license (GPL/commercial) right away, while people are paying attention, and build a consulting business and commercial licensing around it. He won't become an instant billionaire that way, but if he has a worthwhile product, it can be a steady source of good money doing mostly what he enjoys. If he sits on the software too long waiting for a sugar daddy, it will be less and less likely that he will be able to get anything out of it.

Oh, and in case you are wondering whether my argument is disingenuous and I just want to get a free virtual machine, it isn't: I already have VirtualPC and VMware, and I actually prefer the various user mode Linux solutions at this point.