Date: Thu, 13 Nov 97 13:09:40 -0500 From: Garance A Drosehn <gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Virtual Intel Machines? Message-ID: <9711131809.AA29400@eclipse.its.rpi.edu> References: <346A3CA7.237C228A@n2k.com>
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Richard Costine <rjc@n2k.com> wrote: > ... I agree that you couldn't do it exactly the way that VM is > doing it. You would have to emulate everything. [...] This would > make the emulator much slower than a real pentium, ... This would basically be the same as the VirtualPC product that exists for the PowerMac. > Yes, this would be a "Nice Thing to Have". It opens up lots of > possibilities. You could have a real sandbox to run intel-based > code in. We all know there's lots of that about. It is nice to have (I do have VirtualPC on the PowerMac), although the performance hit of an emulator makes it much less enticing for what I wanted to do with it. We (RPI) will be getting more high-end Intel-based systems for public labs here, and I'd love to set them up to run multiple operating systems (WinNT, Rhapsody, and FreeBSD, for instance). The trick is to set that up in such a way that we don't have to worry about students playing with the machines. I had this vision of freebsd being the "real" operating system (in the roll of VM on an IBM mainframe), and then have the other operating systems running as virtual machines underneath that. We wouldn't have to care as much about what students did in those virtual machines, as the "real" OS could always reset the state of a virtual machine to what we (the computing center) wanted it to be. > The point is not how fast it'll run but *that* it'll run. Well, for the things I wanted it *is* important how fast it runs. I don't think I could get away with a public lab of new high-end Pentium II machines that ran like 75Mhz pentiums!! :-) Of course, given that Intel chips work the way they do, it sounds like it'd be pretty much impossible to do what I was hoping for. Sigh. It was such a cool idea, too. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer (MIME & NeXTmail capable) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy NY USA
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