Differences between current version and predecessor to the previous major change of VMWare.
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| Newer page: | version 4 | Last edited on Tuesday, November 2, 2004 4:56:24 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | |
| Older page: | version 1 | Last edited on Friday, July 26, 2002 10:07:35 pm | by CraigBox | Revert |
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
-Software that allows you to create
a self contained __V__irtual __M__achine inside your real machine, and use it as if it was
a real computer
.
+[VMWare | http://www.vmware.com/] is
a commercial VirtualMachine that emulates an entire PC in
a PC
.
-Useful
for things like running
a real version
of MicrosoftWindows under Linux instead
of WineIsNotanEmulator;
to install multiple distributions
to test on your nice
fast machine without having
to stop what you're doing
+[VMWare] is special in that it makes an unusual assumption to allow
for an unusual optimization that allows for unusual performance of emulated code: [VMWare] requires
a [PC] to run. Instead
of emulating the [CPU] along with the rest
of the hardware by interpreting every single MachineCode instruction running in emulation, it runs the code non-emulated on the real hardware [CPU], except for any instructions used by the OperatingSystem or hardware drivers
to interact with the machine. Those are trapped and interpreted as required
to set up the VirtualMachine smoke and mirrors. The result is that code in emulation runs blazingly
fast compared
to any competitor. The speed of applications that do not perform much [I/O] may approach that of running unemulated.
-VMWare is commercial
, see http://www.vmware.com/. You might want to look into Bochs
at http://bochs
.sourceforge.net/ if you want an open-source IA-32 (x86) emulator
.
+Applications that perform a lot of ''bulk'' [I/O] may even run faster
, because they do not require a lot of emulation and can benefit from [Cache]s
at the underlying OperatingSystem's level
. Inbetween those extremes, emulation is as costly as ever
.
