On Sun, 2007-02-11 at 18:34 -0500, Jim Popovitch wrote: > You won't have a pleasant experience on any virtualized platform without > some sort of guest extensions/additions. The guests have no way of > recognizing the underlying virtualized hardware without > extensions/additions. I'm not sure how Qemu handles things... but I > can't imagine that they know something that VMWare or VBox don't.
I'm not sure what you mean by that but QEMU emulates a set of well known hardware peripherals as to specifically _not_ require "additions" from (most) guest OSes. This includes a Cirrus PCI VGA adapter, a USB-HID tablet device (grabless mouse!), among other things. QEMU with the accelerator or a hardware VT module like KVM is comparable in performance to VMware and VirtualBox, and unfortunately is the only free software option ATM on 64-bit hosts. QEMU is far more versatile than either VirtualBox or VMware. Whereas the latter two products are narrowly targeted at running 'modern' x86 operating systems, QEMU is designed to be much more generic and portable, even when it is doing x86-on-x86 virtualization. QEMU can easily be used as so-called 'portable software', taking advantage of acceleration (virtualization) when it is available and gracefully degrading to emulation when it is not. QEMU is the only virtual machine software I am aware of that does not require special privileges on a host machine to use. This is not to say VirtualBox is [better|worse] than QEMU, rather they are are just two different approaches to two similar problems. Andrew _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
