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

[Eric Anderson]

On 04/05/07 16:57, Juergen Lock wrote:
> 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/


VirtualBox looks VERY nice..  I've seen a thread about a month ago from 
someone trying to get it to compile on FreeBSD.  After hacking the 
configure file a bit, I've gotten closer, but some of the kmk stuff is 
linked to libc.so.6, which isn't so good for me running -CURRENT. 
Honestly, I think porting vmware is now less interesting knowing that 
virtualbox is so competitive, and more easily portable.

Eric