Oded Arbel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > ביום שלישי 11 נובמבר 2003, 09:25, נכתב על ידי Shachar Shemesh: > > Any news on free alternatives to VMWare? Boches is so slow it hurts, and > > plex86 never left the ground, as far as I know. > > plex86 has been discontinued
.. when Mandrake ran into financial trouble not so long ago, fired Kevin Lawton (the brain behind all this), and put plex86 on ice (Mandrake bought bochs, which was commercial at the time, from kevin and hired him to continue development, and subsequently released bochs under LGPL on sourceforge). Just to add a tidbit: there is a difference between bochs and plex86. Plex86 is a virtualization engine that does what VMWare and Connectix do, i.e. run a virtual x86 on an x86. Bochs is an x86 emulator - a userspace only code that emulates all the h/w instructions in software, and does not use any host instructions at all. As such, it is very slow but has the advantage of being portable across numerous host platforms (hardware and OS). Virtualization engines achieve much better performance because they can execute guest instructions (at least many of them) natively, at the expense of portability, of course. > and currently has been re-engineered to run only linux by supplying > a fixed set of emulated PC hardware devices for which kernel support > should be written. they have a somewhat running version (with the > required kernel patches) but setting it up is difficult and at the > end you have a headless box - there is currently no infrastracture > for sharing the host OS head gear (keyboard, mouse and screen). I have not tried it, yet (I intend to). My understanding is that there is a HAL that will allow to handle I/O (network, disk, console, etc) through the host OS. Once guest Linux is up you can ssh to it from the host (or from another machine) and run Mozilla or whatever, redirected to your screen (things are simpler in Linux, a virtualized Linux can indeed be headless). As such, it is functionally somewhat similar to UML, though the underlying technique is very different, of course. The old plex86 is still maintained on Savanna, but not very active now that Kevin Lawton has left. Note that both bochs and plex86 (the old one and the new one) are brainchildren of one and the same person - the aforementioned Kevin Lawton. He deserves help, I think, so if you are up to it... GPL purists, beware: the license is MIT. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
