-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: plex86 guest os (video) drivers
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 14:12:39 -0800
From: "Kendall Bennett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: SciTech Software, Inc.
To: Jeroen Janssen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi Jeroen,
> > Sounds interesting. What specifically is the purpose of plex86? Is
> > it something for Linux, or something else entirely? Or is it an
> > Open Source version of VMWare?
>
> It's more of the latter (as you can see at the first mailinglist
> archive :). It's not Linux only, there is also some BeOS and
> FreeBSD work in progress.
Sounds neat. I will check up on it some more and find out what it is
about.
> > We might be interested in helping in this area, but our core
> > device driver technology is not Open Source. It is unlikely that
> > it will become Open Source anytime soon, simply because of the vast
> > number of NDA's that we have signed in order to develop the
> > product.
>
> I understand and I wouldn't want you to give away your core
> business (even if it were possible, regardless of the NDA's). I
> just have the "feeling" that you have lot of experience (& ideas)
> wrt the writing of (video) drivers,etc and that might help us
> develop (good) graphics drivers for a number of different guest
> platforms.
Yes, we have lots and lots of experience in this area. However bear
in mind that guest OS drivers (or shell drivers as we call them) is
also our core business. Some of them are Open Source (like our
XFree86 shell drivers), but our OS/2 and Windows drivers are closed
source. We may Open Source those components in the future as we see
fit however.
> > However we are happy to work with Open Source devleopers who wish to be able to
> > utilise our device driver technology for different projects.
>
> I am not exactly familiar how your device driver technology
> "works" (I believe I read somewhere that you have platform
> independent drivers?)
Yes, the core of our device driver technology is completely cross
platform, binary portable device drivers. Above that is what we call
the shell driver, which is the OS specific components that make up
the display driver (ie: the Windows GDI driver, the OS/2 GRADD driver
and the XFree86 driver).
> and how we will be able to utilise it for plex86, but I think that
> will also relate to how we're going to address the host <-> guest
> interface.
The most likely scenario as I see it, is that the actual drivers to
control the hardware are loaded only by the virtual machine system
(ie: plex86), and shared by all guest OS'es. Then the guest OS
drivers talk to the VM hardware driver via some kind of RPC mechanism.
> It's only possible to run MSDOS & FreeDOS at the moment and I
> don't know "how long it will take" for plex86 to be able to run
> windows or linux (it might take some time), but it's good to know
> that you show interest in this :)
It sounds like an interesting project. VMWare intrigues me, but I
can't play with the internals at all, so plex86 sounds interesting.
> btw, is it ok for me to forward this message and the previous one
> to the plex86 mailinglist?
Sure.
Regards,
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| SciTech Software - Building Truly Plug'n'Play Software! |
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| Kendall Bennett | Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| Director of Engineering | Phone: (530) 894 8400 |
| SciTech Software, Inc. | Fax : (530) 894 9069 |
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