I was playing with VMWare and Plex86 (what would work at least) the
other day. I got to thinking a lot about why they run slower than a
native OS. It is because they have to go through another Operating
system to get to the hard ware. Why Run one OS just to run another.
Well, what if Plex86 _WAS_ the OS. A small one, that just creates VMs
to run other operating systems. Using CTRL + SHIFT + (F1-F12) to switch
between VMs. If the OS was optimized for Running Other OS's, than the
speed would increase dramatically.
The VMOS could be based of Linux or some other Unix system. Using the
Ext2 partition to manage configuration, keeping the file system
structure. This way the VMs could be configured to use a file (ex:
/home/user/hd.img) or an actually device (ex: /dev/hda) for disk I/O.
Memory management and resource sharing should be no different than the
Current way that Plex86 is handling it.
What is everyone elses thoughts or comments on the topic?
--Don Becker
