| From: Bruce Nik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | | XP was able to find the driver for x100p automatically (online) and installed it | properly but even then it didn't work (still have to do some more testing though).
XP saw it as what? An Intel WinModem, I assume. Work as what? A modem? It ought to work. Something for FXO? XP's automatic driver discovery probably would not manage that. Intel never supported that. | So how does VMware support other cards? e.g. Sound Card, LAN card... (has the bridge | been worked for them in VMware already?) [Top posting is bad. I'm too lazy to copy Sidan's text into the right place.] [The following is based on deduction and may not actually match the facts. I'm interested in this stuff but have not yet used VMware, Xen, Asterisk, or x100p.] Virtualizing I/O devices well is hard. You want: - efficiency - security (virtual machines cannot be allowed to damage each other or the host) - sharing (several virtual machines and the host using the same device) - transparency (the device looks to the system to be itself) - support for the 10^100 different devices These cannot all be achieved at once. As I understand it, VMWare does not give a virtual machine access to the raw PCI bus (nor the ensuing interrupts). That would be suicidal. It would damage security and sharing but would be great for efficiency and transparency. It would make it easy to support a lot of devices. So every PCI access from the virtual machine must be emulated/simulated/faked by VMware. That's why, whatever your network card is, the VMware virtual machine sees a Tulip (or whatever card it is that they decided to emulate). Sound emulation is probably the same. They probably picked one sound card to emulate, no matter what your real soundcard is. They probably have not bothered to build emulations for odd-ball peripherals. The x100p is probably a bad one to use with emulation. I would guess that, as a WinModem, it requires a fairly responsive (real time) driver. The kind of thing that might be hard to provide through layers of emulation. On the other hand, Xen does in some cases give the client machines direct PCI bus access. Scary, at least until Vanderpool or Pacifica are available (they should allow that access to be safely constrained). That might be good enough to run the x100p from a virtual machine. Of course sharing is impossible.
