VMWare

[David Schultz]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2004, Mike Jeays wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 21:00, Alec Berryman wrote:
> > begin  quotation of pete wright on 2004-11-24 17:26:37 -0800:
> > 
> > > i've had no problems running multiple copies of FreeBSD (4.x and
> > > 5.x) as well as openBSD as a vmware guest.
> > 
> > Are you talking about VMWare Workstation or the GSX/ESX server?
> > 
> 
> The part of the presentation that seemed most interesting to me was the
> ESX server.  This seems a lot like the early IBM VM operating system,
> which completely virtualises the hardware.  I thought this was really
> clever when I first heard of it many years ago.  I have often wondered
> what the requirements on the instruction set for a CPU are to make this
> possible.

Actually, x86 isn't fully virtualizable.  My understanding is that
VMWare uses some pretty bizarre code rewriting tricks to make the
emulation work completely correctly.  A friend of mine who knows
x86 way better than I do claims the necessary hacks are not too
complicated, but Ed Wang says they're trade secrets of VMWare and
won't talk about them, so who knows?