On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 1:36 AM, Fernando Cassia <[email protected]> wrote: > Here is an idea... a lot of legacy devices have propietary drivers for > ancient OSs, but lack drivers for other ones (like, say, modern > Linux), because the manufacturers never released information or an > SDK. > > So, here´s the idea... you´ll tell me if it´d be doable (anything is, > from the POV of software and virtualization, I think, given enough > lines of code and brains behind the effort :). > > The idea would be to turn Virtualbox inside-out like a sock :) > > How difficult would it be to create, say, a "host OS virtual NIC > interface" that actually is bridged to a NIC interface on the guest > OS, running propietary drivers under a propietary OS?. > > I´m thinking HPNA 2.0 USB devices, for which Broadcom never released > linux drivers. If I get Virtualbox VM running Win2k and the > propietary Broadcom win2k drivers in there... why can´t the host OS > "see" that NIC as a virtual host-OS nic?. > > It would be like what VBox does with host devices to guests, but the > other way around. :) > > Thoughts? Comments? Expletives? (joke) > FC >
This idea has merit, but let me provide another use case. Before I went back to school for my masters I was in industry and we were faced with that ever present, conversion path problem. How do you go from ancient software hardware that might have come to America on the Mayflower, to something that slightly resembles the 20th century. We found that there was no upgrade path. We would have had to shut down the old system cold, and bring up the new system hot the next day. The problem was reliance on proprietary hardware that is no longer manufactured that has no modern drivers. I thought virtualization was the answer. It almost worked! except at the server where the proprietary hardware was. I desperately needed a way to install a virtualizer that mapped PCI/PCIe/serial/parallel ports directly to a guest. I never found it. VBox can't do this because it needs the underlying OS to function. The closest hope for this is XEN running in the kernel of the host OS. But you couldn't run windows in a xen container (THEN) and you couldn't map physical devices away from the host onto the guest directly. VBox can do this with USB devices, and if there were enough USB conversion devices then that might be an answer. Rance ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Colocation vs. Managed Hosting A question and answer guide to determining the best fit for your organization - today and in the future. http://p.sf.net/sfu/internap-sfd2d _______________________________________________ VBox-users-community mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/vbox-users-community
