Its github page says it's a hypervisor, and in the context of your question as to whether it supports booting an arbitrary OS it doesn't make much of a difference, but, from what I can see it's more of an emulator than a hypervisor. However, for the typical FreeDOS use case, an emulator is indeed a better fit than a hypervisor. The difference is that an emulator simulates the operation of the whole machine in software, whereas "hypervisor" or "virtual machine" usually implies that as much as possible of the code of the guest OS and its applications is run directly by the CPU of the host system as possible, with emulation only happening where necessary to prevent the guest OS from inadvertently or deliberately interfering with the host OS. For the user, the difference is that hypervisors generally have the goal of using spare resources on the host machine to create a new computer similar to the host out of thin air without having to buy a new computer, while emulators generally have the goal of running software that won't generally run well, or at all, on the host, often in cases where the guest architecture is obsolete and working hardware is difficult or impossible to find. This isn't a hard and fast distinction, though: platforms like QEMU will make use of a hypervisor when running code for the host processor, but when running code for a different architecture will run it under full emulation. Some processor architectures (quite a few in the past, not so many now) don't allow every instruction that could interfere with the host OS to be trapped, in which case a hypervisor in the strict sense is impossible and emulation is required even for use cases that would generally use a hypervisor. Also, the term "virtual machine", usually reserved for cases where the guest system is running on top of a hypervisor, is also quite frequently used for emulators that emulate a computer architecture for which no hardware implementations exist or ever intended to exist (such as that used by the Java language), which is a significant use of the term in a context fairly far from that in which it is usually employed.
-------- Original message -------- From: st...@vwebr.net Date: 9/19/2019 22:39 (GMT-06:00) To: "Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS." <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] can FreeDOS do anything to make up for Virtualbox and VMWare's lack of decent support for DOS sound? Please ignore my last. I see that it's a hypervisor, which should do what I need. I almost thought it was too much like DOSBox which is its own OS and I was trying to stay away from that. Nothing against DOSBox, it has its place and is best in what it does. On 2019-09-19 21:22, st...@vwebr.net wrote: Not making any assumptions at all, and frankly it sounds interesting. Merely trying to understand what it is in comparison to Virtualbox and VMWare, or DOSBox. If it's a virtual machine app meant to install an OS into like the first two, then of course I'm very interested. On 2019-09-19 09:30, geneb wrote: On Thu, 19 Sep 2019, st...@vwebr.net wrote: Asking the question a different way. Is there another virtual app (alternatives to Virtualbox or VMWare) that does a much better job supporting DOS hardware which I can install FreeDOS onto? That's what 86Box does - it supports a huge range of hardware. You need to actually use it before assuming it won't meet your needs. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
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