"Timothy R.Butler" wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
> Thanks for all of your replies, and thanks Joe for the welcome! Okay, so
> from what I'm understanding, plex86 isn't exactly ready for XP, but bochs
> might be (I thought plex86 was based on bochs)?
I borrowed a lot of code from bochs to make plex86.
A lot of the internals are different between the two, and had
to be built from new. For some things, I just haven't built
the framework to handle things that perhaps bochs has already.
It's not always the case that missing pieces are difficult, just
haven't hammered them in yet.
Mostly, got to get this new virtualization framework in before I
go making lot of other mods.
In the future, I'd like to see XP run if it's possible. Not
sure what the requirements are - we'll probably have to move to
an all PCI system for that. I realize Micro$oft is falling out of
favor with people for their business practices surrounding XP.
But if we can build the capabilities, people want to help and have
the desire for it to run, then why not? It's not mega-high on
my list, but I want to get as many OSes running as possible ultimately.
> ... but I have one more question. If and
> when Windows 2000 works under plex86, is there anyway to get plex86 to boot
> using a drive partition rather than a disk image?
They're really essentially the same. The deal is that the BIOS
has some mods for >500M drives, though they're not complete. The
IDE emulation can handle much bigger drives, but the least common
denominator effect of the BIOS & IDE IO ports definitions cuts
the size down to 500M, unless the BIOS has the proper extensions.
There were some mods awhile ago to the BIOS. I'm not sure
they are 100% correct.
Just put this in the 'TODO' file. It needs to be fixed.
Now on to the 2nd issue with this. If you're booting a
real partition, then it is likely set up for your real hardware
device profile. But plex86 exports its own devices. So your
guest needs a way of booting an alternate device profile. Kind
of like taking your disk drive out of one computer, and slapping
it in a different machine and booting it.
The 3rd issue is data corruption. Plex86 is not solid-state
yet. You would want to run a write-cache buffer layer between
plex86 and the partition. We have some code in plex86 for this.
You wouldn't want to mess up your hard drive data if it has
important stuff.
--
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Kevin Lawton [EMAIL PROTECTED]
MandrakeSoft, Inc. Plex86 developer
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/ http://www.plex86.org/
