>From someone whose been here a while.......
The plex86 project was focused on making as true a virtualization of the
hardware as possible; so that if you added a scsi card you could have
plex86 use it without any major hell problems, yet at the same time you
could preserve the option to use truly emulated devices. I think that the
best example of this is the parallel port. We decided to virtualize the
raw parallel port as much as possible so that the host machine didn't
need to know how to talk to the printer--and even more importantly, so
that we didn't get stuck writing an emulator for each new printer under
the sun. All of this is possible if there is a host OS to do the
grand-marshaling needed to handle the things that must be emulated--but is
too much of an undertaking without one. If you wish to go insane, you may
try--but we don't suggest it. Please check the mailing list archives for
more info.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2001, Paul te Bokkel wrote:
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> On 21 Sep 2001 (regarding Re: [plex86] Multi-OS Kernel?) Luke-Jr wrote:
>
> >
> > There would be no speed improvement at all?
> >
> > Also, just figuring I should mention it, one good feature Plex86 could
> > have that even VMWare lacks would be hardware forwarding so you
> > can map IRQ, memory ranges, DMA, etc... to the VM in the case of
> > the host OS (Linux) not supporting it...
>
>
> Well, that would be fun.. a user-space app bringing the system
> down.. Sounds like Windows.. *grin*
>
> Remember, a virtual machine emulates the hardware, it's not a mather of
> pass-through.
>
> OTOH, it would be a very nice feature to be able to use exotic hardware
> for which no proper Linux support is available (as for digital cameras or ..
> err.. what's not supported nowadays?), but only for hardware totally
> unsupported by the native OS (thus no VGA, IDE, PICs, DMA and maybe
> no IRQ's). It might also be a feature for developing proper support, as all
> IO can be monitored by Plex..
>
> But IMHO, the first thing for Plex to concentrate on, is getting it to work on
> a basic level: emulating all common hardware on a reasonable speed.
> Features like this should be put on a 'nice to have, but not for now'-list.
>
> Paul
> - --
> Paul te Bokkel
> Sphere Information Technologies BV
> PGP key available and PGP preferred
>
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|^^^ | | |^^| |^^^ Drew Northup, N1XIM |^^| | |^^^ \ / /^^\ /^^~
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