Ok, let me get this straight: ldoms and xen are communities (although I gather that Sun regards them both as technologies under the xvm umbrella). There's a qemu project. There's something on the jive list (with no associated mailing list) called "virtual-client", whatever that is. There's some discussion in games and desktop about wine. Bochs runs on Solaris (not that there are that many occasions to prefer it to qemu). Solaris x86 also runs under vmware. Then there's SNA's work to port to IBM z-Series, which if they ever come out of hiding may get discussed in emerging-platforms, but is also a virtualization issue on the client side, since it's been said that it will run under z/VM rather than on bare metal. And I don't have a clue where the best place to discuss Virtual Box on Solaris (or Solaris on Virtual Box) is, not that I'm running it yet.
Further, by #ifdef'ing out the SCSI support, old versions of hercules (360/370/z-Series emulator) can be built on Solaris (never got to play with MVS at a system level before, what fun!); and thanks to google I've found someone named Jeff Savit (who has a Sun blog yet) that may be working on getting a newer version running on Solaris. If that's not enough, the SIMH suite of emulators run (oh, the memories of v7 on a PDP-11). Either as part of SIMH or elsewhere (forgot), I've gotten at least one 8080/Z80 emulator built to the point of running CP/M (and various software formerly on my Osborne 1, like SuperSort and Turbo Pascal). If I ever signed up for all the right stuff, I suppose I could get a hobbyist copy of VMS for the VAX and run that under the SIMH VAX emulator! If it doesn't already include it, I can imagine that with software such as wine, exec handlers to run the binary as if with the emulation/compatibility layer as an interpreter could make things more friendly; that approach may well apply to more than just wine as a lighter weight solution than say a branded zone (which reminds me that in some sense, zones are a sort of virtualization, and branded zones can border on emulation as well). I know somewhere I've even got an emulator of really old video game consoles running on Solaris, not that I'm going to wax nostalgic over an Atari 2600. I've heard mention of SPARC emulators; if one of them should turn out to be free and perform decently, perhaps reasonably transparent execution of SPARC binaries on x86 might even be possible and eventually good enough for some light-duty uses. Shouldn't there be one (or maybe two) communities for virtualization and emulation, under which as many of the above (and probably more) as don't really need to be out on their own (maybe zones are an exception, since they touch on so much else) could be projects, as sufficient interest arises? There must be some common issues, like security (what risks are there running Windows binaries under wine, for example; and how does that parallel risks that may exist in other less than fully isolated environments?). There might be more chance of such issues being recognized as applicable in more than one place, if these interest groups were gathered together. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
