i too am both curious as to the motivations for VM and completely open
minded with no preconceived notions about VM. except my aversion to
hype. but hype is independent from the quality of an idea.
i was asking Friday here at work, what are the modivations behind VM?
the only answers that were offered were variations on the ability to
rent someone a machine that has root access without having as many
machines are renters. the earliest VM i know of is VM/CMS, from IBM,
which is still used today. its purpose was to provide early
timesharing, and was also used to debug MVS. so those are two
motivation, although Xen can't be used for debugging OSes since it's a
paravirtual machine. i don't think VMware would be too good either
because it rewrites parts of your code. maybe that's not a problem in
practice.
maybe Ron can give us insight into the motivations for using VM.
--- Begin Message ---
Last night I must have been too sleepy. I can't read my own
posting this morning.☺ Then, I'll try once more.
> if you just want to run only Plan9.
Actually, I never understand such kind of attempts.
What is the merit to use mutiple OSs on a machine?
>From a bad humor sense, I can realize it only for saving
power...
Once, I thought it'd be nice if I could use Xen for Linux and Plan 9
web server to use UTF-8 encoded our page. However, I realized
it not so essential after that. Now, I'm thinking like this: if I need
Windows, let's have a machine for it. If I need Plan 9 let's have
three machine for it, etc. Machines are cheeper these days,
so it must be only for saving power for mother earth.☺
Better?
I'm not offending the one machine model for Plan 9 from the
view point of more convenience to more people. However, I think
Geoff's effort should be payed more attention by more Plan 9ers.
Ken ji
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