Bounty and timeline on vmware 5.x on FreeBSD 6.x

[Christian Laursen]

Eric Anderson <anderson at 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