Reality is benchmarks. And Wine sucks at 3DMark06 which is the de facto standard for DirectX. In fact while I was searching for numbers I found lots of apologists like you trying to tell people that they shouldn't run the benchmark.
I wonder why
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=882&num=5 While the 3DMark series are synthetic benchmarks, they had worked well under WINE 0.9.46 and served their function of comparing Windows XP versus the WINE performance with Ubuntu 7.10. When using the GeForce 8600GT in these benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 7.10 with WINE to Windows XP, Windows was the clear winner by a landslide. Windows XP was noticeably faster and in some cases was nearly five times faster.
The only games that work properly on Wine are OpenGL ones, and that's because OpenGL is hardware accelerated (well so long as you use the closed source NVidia drivers not the freetard ones) on Linux.
So much for everything working in reality. Unless by reality you mean what loudmouth evangelists like you post whenever anyone points out flaws with Wine's approach of emulating DirectX on OpenGL when the graphics card hardware is optimized for DirectX.
No, it's much more than that. It's really a book about reverse engineering a closed source OS and working out the data structures it uses. It's also a very good example of explaining cryptic technical details in a readable way, a sort of computer detective story. It's really remarkable.
An ARM would choke emulating an x86 anyway. In fact even if you recompiled the x86 binaries to run on Arm it would still suck because desktop class x86s like Core2 have a higher clock rate, are out of order, have big caches and fast SDRAM.
I don't think you should say that. I think we should let all the Apple fans get angry about Windows apps on iPhones and then realise that it is quite useful, then let Apple ban it and then have to rationalize how that is good for them.
I think that will suck unless you can kick Linux off the video hardware completely and let the guest Windows OS drive it directly.
Why? The video card doesn't care anymore than the CPU cares that Windows is running in a VM.
How do you think games work on Windows and Mac? Do you think the OS suspends itself while a game is running? How do you think running a game in windowed mode works?
Consider a DirectX game on Windows. It calls into a DirectX interface. The code it calls is provided by the graphics driver. It writes a few values into memory mapped registers on the card and returns. Like I said it is a very thin veneer over the hardware, only a few hundred instructions. The card goes to work. Any virtualisation, even trapping the port accesses and then letting them go ahead, will slow this down because adding a few hundred more instructions in such a performance sensitive spot is disasterous. This is the reason fullscreen Dos boxes in NT used to kick the OS off the card for performance. Basically the virtualisation layer, thin as it was crippled performance.
Any sort of virtualisation of DirectX will be painfully slow, and trying to emulate it on top of a OpenGL driver just seems doomed to bad performance.
Yet somehow it works for Wine, Cedega, and pretty much any port of a DirectX game to Mac OS X and Linux.
Yeah right. This is a much thicker virtualisation layer, for example it would need to translate DirectX shader language into OpenGL shader language, translate all the DX calls into equivalent OGL ones and so on.
Woohoo, I can run my games at half speed, low quality (No DX10/SM3) and have them crash or render badly occasionally. Given that modern games on an oldish system are a bit sluggish even in Windows, why would I want to do that?
Uhm, I ran GZDoom (OpenGL-accelerated port) on VBox2.1 in a Linux host, XP guest, and it ran perfectly well, no visual artifacts or anything weird aside from high CPU usage (if enough video RAM is allocated, it might perform better, I barely had 40mb of VRAM in that virtual machine). I don't have any more accelerated games around that aren't dependent on D3D, but I was very satisfied for now. Now a compatibility layer on D3D and it'll be pure gold.
I think that will suck unless you can kick Linux off the video hardware completely and let the guest Windows OS drive it directly. Modern games are not that quick even on a modern graphics card where DirectX calls are a thin wrapper provided by the driver over hardware. Any sort of virtualisation of DirectX will be painfully slow, and trying to emulate it on top of a OpenGL driver just seems doomed to bad performance.
Steam is DRM. It controls what you can and can't do with a product you have bought and paid for. It's dependent on activation servers, which it contacts every time you launch a game, just like Spore was going to before the outcry.
In a very meaningful sense it's less abhorrent than SecuROM, as it doesn't go out of its way dig its tendrils into the OS, breaking random things and throwing hissy fits if it finds innocuous software it doesn't like. There's no bullshit "activations" to use up, and it doesn't leave bits of itself behind when you uninstall it.
But in other ways it's worse. You don't really own a Steam game. You can't loan a copy of a Steam game to a friend, or sell it to someone, or even give it away for free, except in specific cases where Valve decides to let you. If something happened to Valve, or they just decided they didn't like the cut of your jib and aren't going to let you play your game anymore, you'd be shit out of luck.
I dunno. I have no interest in selling old games, or even playing them. Games are ephemera IMO. What I like about Steam is that if I'm in some random country I can download and play a game as soon as it comes out without depriving the company that made it of their money rather than spend ages trying to find a store that sells the English version.
And the companies like it because they can sell the games online without worrying about them ending up on pirate bay.
And if you still want to have a box with resale value, most games are available in that format too.
Well it's virtualized in the sense that when a process writes to path, the kernel checks for a list of paths that the process can't write to because of Vista UAC but could have written to on XP, chucks a prefix on the front and passes the prefixed path down to the filesystem.
Describing that as a VM is a bit misleading though, because it sounds like you have a much larger performance hit than is actually the case. Vista has some bloaty design changes, but this isn't one of them. Actually it is quite sensible.
The first link means that the Bios had a bug that only shows up in Vista. They released a fix but didn't test with XP and because of that they only recomended Vista users to upgrade. Or maybe they tested with XP and something broke. Still if they tell people using XP not to upgrade, don't complain if upgrading breaks shit. There is no conspiracy. Companies 'not supporting' something means they haven't tested it and don't guarantee it works, not that they've sabotaged it.
The second link. Sounds like a Bios bug. They released a patch for it.
Buying a machine that doesn't support the software you want to use and then ranting and raving to some lowly tech support person when it doesn't work is dumb, entitled and obnoxious. They don't have a say in what is supported - that's a decision taken by the marketing department based on the relative popularity of the OSs. Ranting that your favourite OS is unsupported will just make them write the fact it is unsupported in bigger letters, not spend money testing and bug fixing to make it supported.
Plus, it's Linux. There are always ways to get it to boot on anything, supported or not if you do the work as people pointed out to the OP in the second link. All this hackactivism attacking of tech support people is just an attempt to punt the work onto them.
To give you some idea of how awful this behaviour is consider how you'd react to some Windows zealot email bombing your Linux only project with bug reports that it doesn't work on Windows.
IE7 isn't 'run inside a VM' it's run in a process which is prevented from doing a lot of stuff, e.g. it is only allowed file access to the temp directory.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/09/528963.aspx Internet-facing applications such as browsers are inherently at a higher security risk than other applications because they can download untrustworthy content from unknown sources. IE7's Protected Mode leverage's Windows Vista's UAC, MIC and UIPI features to boost browser security. In IE7's Protected Mode-which is the default in other than the Trusted security zone-the IE process runs with Low rights, even if the logged-in user is an administrator. Since add-ins to IE such as ActiveX controls and toolbars run within the IE process, those add-ins run Low as well. The idea behind Protected Mode IE is that even if an attacker somehow defeated every defense mechanism and gained control of the IE process and got it to run some arbitrary code, that code would be severely limited in what it could do. Almost all of the file system and registry would be off-limits to it for writing, reducing the ability of an exploit to modify the system or harm user files. The code wouldn't have enough privileges to install software, put files in the user's Startup folder, hijack browser settings, or other nastiness.
It's a good idea and it doesn't affect performance.
Actually Microsoft made a mistake when the released XP, which turned out to good enough that people didn't want to upgrade. Thanks to the peverse incentives of the market, Vista was less of a mistake economically than XP.
mount -o ssd option, which clusters file data writes together regardless of the directory the files belong to.
You don't need to do this. SSDs do wear levelling and wear levelling will group writes to the same physical erase unit even if they are no contiguous on disk. Or at least SSDs that score will on benchmarks do.
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Yet I can run old DirectX games slowly
Fixed that for you. Unless you dual boot into Windows of course.
Reality is benchmarks. And Wine sucks at 3DMark06 which is the de facto standard for DirectX. In fact while I was searching for numbers I found lots of apologists like you trying to tell people that they shouldn't run the benchmark.
I wonder why
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=882&num=5
While the 3DMark series are synthetic benchmarks, they had worked well under WINE 0.9.46 and served their function of comparing Windows XP versus the WINE performance with Ubuntu 7.10. When using the GeForce 8600GT in these benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 7.10 with WINE to Windows XP, Windows was the clear winner by a landslide. Windows XP was noticeably faster and in some cases was nearly five times faster.
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/02/wine-vs-windows-xp-benchmarks.html
And not surprisingly, Wine lags behind Windows XP in the graphics test suite which uses DirectX instead of OpenGL.
Plus new games like Crysis don't work.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=658415
The only games that work properly on Wine are OpenGL ones, and that's because OpenGL is hardware accelerated (well so long as you use the closed source NVidia drivers not the freetard ones) on Linux.
So much for everything working in reality. Unless by reality you mean what loudmouth evangelists like you post whenever anyone points out flaws with Wine's approach of emulating DirectX on OpenGL when the graphics card hardware is optimized for DirectX.
No, it's much more than that. It's really a book about reverse engineering a closed source OS and working out the data structures it uses. It's also a very good example of explaining cryptic technical details in a readable way, a sort of computer detective story. It's really remarkable.
An ARM would choke emulating an x86 anyway. In fact even if you recompiled the x86 binaries to run on Arm it would still suck because desktop class x86s like Core2 have a higher clock rate, are out of order, have big caches and fast SDRAM.
An iPhone apparently has a ARM1176JZF running at ~400Mhz. The fastest ARM a QCT Snapdragon ARM at 1Ghz will most likely be slower than the slowest netbook class x86, an Intel Atom at 1.6Ghz.
Of course ARM uses much less power, but for single thread integer performance ARM is in a completely different class from x86.
I don't think you should say that. I think we should let all the Apple fans get angry about Windows apps on iPhones and then realise that it is quite useful, then let Apple ban it and then have to rationalize how that is good for them.
It's fun to listen too.
Undocumented DOS by Andrew Schulman and Ralph Brown
I think that will suck unless you can kick Linux off the video hardware completely and let the guest Windows OS drive it directly.
Why? The video card doesn't care anymore than the CPU cares that Windows is running in a VM.
How do you think games work on Windows and Mac? Do you think the OS suspends itself while a game is running? How do you think running a game in windowed mode works?
Consider a DirectX game on Windows. It calls into a DirectX interface. The code it calls is provided by the graphics driver. It writes a few values into memory mapped registers on the card and returns. Like I said it is a very thin veneer over the hardware, only a few hundred instructions. The card goes to work. Any virtualisation, even trapping the port accesses and then letting them go ahead, will slow this down because adding a few hundred more instructions in such a performance sensitive spot is disasterous. This is the reason fullscreen Dos boxes in NT used to kick the OS off the card for performance. Basically the virtualisation layer, thin as it was crippled performance.
Any sort of virtualisation of DirectX will be painfully slow, and trying to emulate it on top of a OpenGL driver just seems doomed to bad performance.
Yet somehow it works for Wine, Cedega, and pretty much any port of a DirectX game to Mac OS X and Linux.
Yeah right. This is a much thicker virtualisation layer, for example it would need to translate DirectX shader language into OpenGL shader language, translate all the DX calls into equivalent OGL ones and so on.
And sure enough
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=13809
Linux: 2461 points (Vista: 4490 points)
Woohoo, I can run my games at half speed, low quality (No DX10/SM3) and have them crash or render badly occasionally. Given that modern games on an oldish system are a bit sluggish even in Windows, why would I want to do that?
Let's try to limit the Wikipedia notion that knowledge and trivia are the same thing.
Yeah, knowledge is very different from trivia.
Yo dawg! I heard you like 64 bit so we put a 64 bit in yo 32 bit so you can compute using upto 4GB while you compute.
Uhm, I ran GZDoom (OpenGL-accelerated port) on VBox2.1 in a Linux host, XP guest, and it ran perfectly well, no visual artifacts or anything weird aside from high CPU usage (if enough video RAM is allocated, it might perform better, I barely had 40mb of VRAM in that virtual machine).
I don't have any more accelerated games around that aren't dependent on D3D, but I was very satisfied for now. Now a compatibility layer on D3D and it'll be pure gold.
I think that will suck unless you can kick Linux off the video hardware completely and let the guest Windows OS drive it directly. Modern games are not that quick even on a modern graphics card where DirectX calls are a thin wrapper provided by the driver over hardware. Any sort of virtualisation of DirectX will be painfully slow, and trying to emulate it on top of a OpenGL driver just seems doomed to bad performance.
> the built in Webcam on the aspire one (many others too) That is now detected by the guest.
Am I to understand that you're running guest operating systems on a nettop?
Forget Chuck Norris, you're the real badass!
They're callled netbooks since that dude got his junk burned.
You mean you want an arrogant obnoxious know-it-all fictional character to play the part of Linux?
Why can't we just pick a hot nekkid chick?
I think you'll find it is spelled naked. Also I'm not sure why immature, unclothed avians are warm. Your post is illogical in the extreme.
Steam is DRM. It controls what you can and can't do with a product you have bought and paid for. It's dependent on activation servers, which it contacts every time you launch a game, just like Spore was going to before the outcry.
In a very meaningful sense it's less abhorrent than SecuROM, as it doesn't go out of its way dig its tendrils into the OS, breaking random things and throwing hissy fits if it finds innocuous software it doesn't like. There's no bullshit "activations" to use up, and it doesn't leave bits of itself behind when you uninstall it.
But in other ways it's worse. You don't really own a Steam game. You can't loan a copy of a Steam game to a friend, or sell it to someone, or even give it away for free, except in specific cases where Valve decides to let you. If something happened to Valve, or they just decided they didn't like the cut of your jib and aren't going to let you play your game anymore, you'd be shit out of luck.
I dunno. I have no interest in selling old games, or even playing them. Games are ephemera IMO. What I like about Steam is that if I'm in some random country I can download and play a game as soon as it comes out without depriving the company that made it of their money rather than spend ages trying to find a store that sells the English version.
And the companies like it because they can sell the games online without worrying about them ending up on pirate bay.
And if you still want to have a box with resale value, most games are available in that format too.
Amtip: You're right.
Cheap holidays in Stalinist Misery!
Red onez make you go fasta.
Well it's virtualized in the sense that when a process writes to path, the kernel checks for a list of paths that the process can't write to because of Vista UAC but could have written to on XP, chucks a prefix on the front and passes the prefixed path down to the filesystem.
Describing that as a VM is a bit misleading though, because it sounds like you have a much larger performance hit than is actually the case. Vista has some bloaty design changes, but this isn't one of them. Actually it is quite sensible.
The stupid in those links burns my eyes.
The first link means that the Bios had a bug that only shows up in Vista. They released a fix but didn't test with XP and because of that they only recomended Vista users to upgrade. Or maybe they tested with XP and something broke. Still if they tell people using XP not to upgrade, don't complain if upgrading breaks shit. There is no conspiracy. Companies 'not supporting' something means they haven't tested it and don't guarantee it works, not that they've sabotaged it.
The second link. Sounds like a Bios bug. They released a patch for it.
Buying a machine that doesn't support the software you want to use and then ranting and raving to some lowly tech support person when it doesn't work is dumb, entitled and obnoxious. They don't have a say in what is supported - that's a decision taken by the marketing department based on the relative popularity of the OSs. Ranting that your favourite OS is unsupported will just make them write the fact it is unsupported in bigger letters, not spend money testing and bug fixing to make it supported.
Plus, it's Linux. There are always ways to get it to boot on anything, supported or not if you do the work as people pointed out to the OP in the second link. All this hackactivism attacking of tech support people is just an attempt to punt the work onto them.
To give you some idea of how awful this behaviour is consider how you'd react to some Windows zealot email bombing your Linux only project with bug reports that it doesn't work on Windows.
That wasn't a reboot, it was more of a fuckshitcrap.
All those students get turned into cybermen using implants bought with the cash though. Kevin Warwick is an evil, evil man.
IE7 isn't 'run inside a VM' it's run in a process which is prevented from doing a lot of stuff, e.g. it is only allowed file access to the temp directory.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/09/528963.aspx
Internet-facing applications such as browsers are inherently at a higher security risk than other applications because they can download untrustworthy content from unknown sources. IE7's Protected Mode leverage's Windows Vista's UAC, MIC and UIPI features to boost browser security. In IE7's Protected Mode-which is the default in other than the Trusted security zone-the IE process runs with Low rights, even if the logged-in user is an administrator. Since add-ins to IE such as ActiveX controls and toolbars run within the IE process, those add-ins run Low as well. The idea behind Protected Mode IE is that even if an attacker somehow defeated every defense mechanism and gained control of the IE process and got it to run some arbitrary code, that code would be severely limited in what it could do. Almost all of the file system and registry would be off-limits to it for writing, reducing the ability of an exploit to modify the system or harm user files. The code wouldn't have enough privileges to install software, put files in the user's Startup folder, hijack browser settings, or other nastiness.
It's a good idea and it doesn't affect performance.
Duuuude!
Hey, don't bogart that thing man. Pass it over here.
Actually Microsoft made a mistake when the released XP, which turned out to good enough that people didn't want to upgrade. Thanks to the peverse incentives of the market, Vista was less of a mistake economically than XP.
mount -o ssd option, which clusters file data writes together regardless of the directory the files belong to.
You don't need to do this. SSDs do wear levelling and wear levelling will group writes to the same physical erase unit even if they are no contiguous on disk. Or at least SSDs that score will on benchmarks do.
Careful, en dash is an attempt by the evil Microsoft corporation to embrace and extend iso-8859-1
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/windows-chars.html
Slashdot doesn't support this, so if you cut and paste text with en dashes into a slashdot post it will come out all fubar.