Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 18:16:45 +0200 From: Christian Laursen <xi@borderworlds.dk> To: Eric Anderson <anderson@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Bounty and timeline on vmware 5.x on FreeBSD 6.x Message-ID: <ygftzvuhk42.fsf@dominion.borderworlds.dk> In-Reply-To: <4614F65D.3010403@freebsd.org> (Eric Anderson's message of "Thu, 05 Apr 2007 08:15:09 -0500") References: <200704050712.l357Ck5F000488@pluto.hedeland.org> <4614F65D.3010403@freebsd.org>
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Eric Anderson <anderson@freebsd.org> writes:
>>> Maybe the real question is, what is QEMU missing, that VMWare has?
>>> I can think of three things right off:
>>>
>>> - Good video card support
>>> - Real PXE enabled network card
>>> - VM extension use (huge in my opinion)
>>
>> Personally (a relatively happy qemu user since a year or so) I don't
>> care at all about the first two - and don't know if I care about the
>> last one - what is it?:-)
>
> The first one is essential for running any graphical OS at full screen
> on a halfway decent system (my laptop has 1920x1200 resolution!).
> Sure I can run in a smaller window, but my point is that it isn't
> synchronous to vmware in that case.
Patches have been posted to qemu-devel implementing the vmware video card.
Chances are good, that it will be committed at some point.
> PXE boot support is essential for a lot of people doing lots of kernel
> development, either in FreeBSD or Linux. Of course you don't have to
> have that, but I've found it to be incredibly helpful. QEMU actually
> has etherboot support, which supports pxe booting, but the FreeBSD BTX
> goo is slightly unhappy with that, and causes it not to work. I don't
> know anything about BTX or assembly, so I can't help there.
Some PXE stuff has been committed to QEMU cvs since the last release.
I'm not sure whether it is included in the version installed by the
qemu-devel port.
> The last one is relating to newer processors' feature of virtual
> machine extensions, both Intel ('Core' and 'Core 2') and latest AMD
> processors have that. What that allows, is basically the virtual
> machine to run it's own virtual processor, using the real processor to
> do most of the CPU virtualization - which means the system runs native
> speed. I can tell you from using VMWare workstation 5.5 with that
> extension, that it is *FAST*. I think only work on kqemu kernel
> module would be needed there, but I don't know really.
Hardware virtualization is mentioned on
<http://qemu.org/kqemu-tech.html#SEC14>. I'm not exactly sure what the
timeframe is for the things listed there.
--
Christian Laursen
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