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MS, Intel "Goofed Up" Win 7 XP Virtualization

Posted by kdawson on from the one-man's-goof dept.

clang_jangle writes "Ars Technica has a short article up describing how Microsoft and Intel have 'goofed up' Windows 7's XP Mode by ensuring many PCs will not be able to use it. (And it won't be easy to figure out in advance if your PC is one of them.) Meanwhile, over at Infoworld, Redmond is criticized for having the 'right idea, wrong technology' with their latest compatibility scheme, and PC World says 'great idea, on paper.' With Windows 7 due to be released in 2010, and Redmond apparently eager to move on from XP, perhaps this is not really a 'goof' at all?"

15 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Hardware Virtualization needed. by mister_playboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    AMD has placed this support in almost all of their recent chips, but Intel has been more stingy with it.

    It's necessary to use 64-bit guests in Virtualbox, but VMWare can make due without it.

    --
    Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will
    1. Re:Hardware Virtualization needed. by AndrewNeo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It surprised the heck out of me when I found I could run 64-bit guests on a (32-bit host OS, 64-bit hardware) with hardware virtualization, at least on my AMD.

    2. Re:Hardware Virtualization needed. by pegr · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Apple did this, not once but twice. Why is Redmond so afraid of trading out the basic underpinnings? I guess they married the concept of permenant backwards compatibility when they used that very stick to beat OS/2 into the ground.

      Is Rosetta Stone a good technology? No, but it got users over the hump. (It was, however, a great hack...)
      How about Fat Binaries? Good lord, Win binaries are fat enough already!

      There's no good solution, so Redmond has to go with "good enough" to get users over to "the other side". Hey Bill! Maybe they don't want to go...

    3. Re:Hardware Virtualization needed. by EvanED · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apple did this, not once but twice. Why is Redmond so afraid of trading out the basic underpinnings?

      And what's Apple's market share? What's Microsoft's?

      You say it yourself: "they used that very stick to beat OS/2 into the ground."

      I would say that the single biggest reason that Windows is as prevalent as it is today is that to a very large extent, MS has maintained backwards compatibility at almost any cost. I can only think of a couple exceptions: transitions to the NT line stopped some old DOS programs that access sound cards and stuff directly from working, XP SP2 made a few similar strides (I don't know details), Vista makes a couple more, and x64-based Windows drops support for 16-bit programs (but this is largely the fault of AMD/Intel rather than MS, who would have had to work around processor limitations since 16-bit instructions aren't available in 64-bit mode).

      But even with Vista 32-bit, my experience is that each of the three or four DOS programs from the mid-80s still ran. There are few systems that can claim this lineage. So it's no wonder to me that MS doesn't want to give it up.

      And it's only recently that the pile of compatibility hacks and inability to make fundamental design decisions has caught up to MS and been harming them from the market's point of view.

    4. Re:Hardware Virtualization needed. by digitalunity · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'd be happy if Vista included virtualization technology for DOS6.2 on a 386. That would allow much smoother operation of very old programs that some of us still use, or want to use at least.

      --
      You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
    5. Re:Hardware Virtualization needed. by Thuktun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I would say that the single biggest reason that Windows is as prevalent as it is today is that to a very large extent, MS has maintained backwards compatibility at almost any cost.

      Curious. At home, I've got a large collection of children's educational and gaming software written for DOS through Windows 98 that utterly fail to run properly in Windows XP or Vista. I haven't experienced this compatibility of which you speak.

  2. Difficult? by blueg3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I suppose it depends on your definition of "difficult" -- it's not particularly hard to find out if your processor supports virtualization extensions.

    The Ars Technica is terrible -- it implies that it's a complete mystery why a virtualization system would require processor virtualization extensions to function.

    I'm also not entirely sure it's reasonable to call a logical design decision you disagree with a "goof". I would hazard a guess that requiring virtualization extensions is intentional, not a mistake.

  3. I hate to ask the obvious by fermion · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Why does MS need a separate XP mode? Why are the two so different that one needs a separate product, virtual PC to run the code? Why do they want XP to run on a virtual machine at all? It this decision based on the way Windows work, or does MS just not want such an ability integrated into the OS.

    The reason I am confused is because this would have been great for the Vista transition, and seems to be old technology. Over ten years ago Apple included this capability in OS X, allowing OS 9 application to run in the classic environment. Apple also included bundles to allow the transition from 68K to PPC, and later PPC to Intel. Why did MS not do the same, and why are the including a hack solution at the last minute.

    --
    "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
    1. Re:I hate to ask the obvious by blueg3 · · Score: 5, Informative

      The solution Microsoft is adding to Windows 7 is the same solution Apple used for the OS 9 - X transition. Classic was a second operating system that ran essentially as a virtual machine.

  4. Who Cares? by siuengr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't understand why people are making such a big deal about XP Mode. It is meant for enterprise systems that have millions invested in software that is difficult to convert. 99.9% of people are not going to be using XP mode.

  5. How to figure it out by bflong · · Score: 5, Informative

    When running Linux, open up a terminal and run this:
    echo -n "Does my cpu support virtualizaiton? "; if `cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -q svm || cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -q vmx`; then echo Yes; else echo No; fi

    Another issue you may have is if your system has the virtualization functions disabled in BIOS. Some laptops do this, and have no way to turn them on. My Dell D820 works fine.

    --
    Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
    1. Re:How to figure it out by pthreadunixman · · Score: 5, Informative

      You both win the useless use of cat award.

  6. Oh, it's a goof all right by localroger · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The only reason MS is putting this silly scheme into 7 is the large number of corporate interests who have apps that will not run on Vista or 7 natively, and which they do not want to rewrite. The virtual machine was supposed to get them to stop demanding XP from their vendors since there would be a solution. Only it might not be such a reliable solution, particularly on those millions of boxes which won't be quite new but also won't be quite old enough to discard which are in use today.

    This is a very critical problem for Microsoft. I have heard people who would never have even looked at a non-MS solution two years ago whispering about Macs and Ubuntu. If migrating is going to involve a vast amount of unscheduled pain, reinstallation, down time, and retraining, do you migrate to the next level of the company which is screwing you or look for an alternative?

    Seven has to solve the problem of legacy apps that don't run. If it doesn't, the Mexican standoff will continue with Seven in Vista's place, and one or two Fortune 100 shops throwing their hands in the air and switching FOSS could start a stampede. The unlikeliness of that, while high, decreases just a bit for every day the current situation persists.

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  7. Are the slashdot editors getting desperate? by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously, this Windows 7 stuff is getting silly. That Slashdot isn't a pro MS site is fine. How about more Linux news, less MS news then?

    It gets tiresome to see all these bullshit "OMG Windoze sux!!!1111one" stories any time a new version is coming out. Just leave off it already. If you don't like Windows 7 that is totally fine, but that isn't any reason to try and spread FUD about it. Make no mistake, that's what all this is too. They are trying to find minor things to pick on and make them out to be major problems. They are trying to say "Oh this will be a horrible OS!" They are trying to seed fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

    Also I kinda think it shows the opposite: If all you can find to report bad are extremely minor things, then I guess it really isn't that bad, is it? I mean let's see what criticisms they've tried to blow up lately"

    1) Windows doesn't show extensions by default.
    2) Windows 7 isn't all that much faster than Vista SP1, and the release version of Vista was slower than XP.
    3) An optional Windows 7 addon, that most people will never download, requires a CPU addon that not all CPUs have.

    Oh gee wow, what a problematic list. I mean really, if that's all you can come up with, if that's the worst of the worst, the stuff that's headline worthy, I think really that shows that 7 is a good OS, not a bad one, because it's all a bunch of BS. As a quick example for each point:

    1) So what, every version of Windows since 95 has been like this, and in Linux, anything can be an executable. You can have any extension or no extension and run it.
    2) This is a fake comparison. Vista at release was slower than Vista now, a better comparison is Windows 7 to XP directly, in which case 7 does pretty well. Also, new OSes are usually a bit slower, due to new features, what else is new? DOS is screaming fast, but rather worthless.
    3) Very few people will ever get this, because it just isn't needed. Native compatibility is extremely high in Windows 7. This is for businesses who have some odd old apps. It is just a nice, free, addon is people want it.

    So please, can we stop with the FUD? If there's real news worthy 7 stuff, post it. If not, then just ignore it, because right now it seems like they are grasping at straws to try and find things wrong with 7.

  8. Re:A minor update by Ephemeriis · · Score: 5, Informative

    That suite of applications that you're testing doesn't accurately represent the target population for XP emulation.

    XP Emulation is primarily geared towards businesses with legacy/custom business applications which have not been re-written for Windows Vista/7.

    We run an ancient version of Televantage here.

    The Televantage server itself is still running NT4. The client software refuses to run on anything newer than Windows XP SP1.

    The solution has been to go ahead and update our machines to SP2/SP3/Vista/whatever and run Televantage inside a small virtual machine running Windows 2000 SP4 - it works great.

    This is the kind of problem the XP-mode is intended to address.

    --
    "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde