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

[Juergen Lock]

On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 06:16:45PM +0200, Christian Laursen wrote:
> 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.

It has been committed to qemu cvs, will soon be to the qemu-devel port
assuming no bad regressions found in testing. (It doesn't seem to work
with xorg 7.1.0 tho, at least in quick testing, see my post on the
qemu list.)
> 
> > 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.

 It is, but its based on etherboot roms which don't work with FreeBSD's
bootcode (due to the real mode problem?  don't remember...)
> 
> > 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.

 Me neither.  It might be worth noting that there are other opensource
virtualization solutions out now that could be worth looking at by
interested kernel developers, porting those might be easier than
closed source vmware...

1. kvm, for cpus with hardware virtualization support (based on qemu):
	http://kvm.qumranet.com/

2. virtualbox, which also runs vista:
	http://virtualbox.org/

(and 3. xen which can also use cpus with hardware virtualization support,
but thats already being worked at afaik.)

	Juergen