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Re: Win4Lin - Anyone Know Anything (Esp. Hebrew) ?
Aharon Schkolnik wrote:
> I just read about Win4Lin on freshmeat, and it sounds very
> interesting. (http://www.trelos.com/) I was going to buy VMWare, but
> this thing looks like it would be sufficient for my needs, and you
> can't beat the price (). The only thing is that there's no demo, so
> you can't see if it really works, and does what you need. Does anyone
> know anything about it, especiall with regards to Hebrew ?
I know David Peet and his cool software for many years (it was called
"Merge" before, and supplied virtual machines for other OSes, like
Solaris/x86 and SCO). It is not true that VMware invented the X86
virtualization; It was invented by the founder of Locus, a professor
with many articles about this issue. Moreover, some claims and parts of
VMware's patent were prior-arted by Locus. David Peet was the Guru who
did most of the coding, and after Locus was aquired by Platinum, the
professor became a VP of the merged company, and David Peet became the
only one to deal with this software. Platinum didn't understand the
huge potential of the software, and did almost everything to hurt its
sales. After Platinum was aquired by CA, they agreed that David Peet
would build a spin-off, but it was too late - VMware started its betas.
Regarding Hebrew: Isn't supported. I'll give some background: Contrary
to running a virtual 8086 under 386 and up, there is no infrastructure
for running a virtual 386 (or higher), under ANY Intel processor (maybe
Itanium or Mkinley will be different in this point). The problem is
that you can't just run the guest OS directly. If you give it full
privileges (hardware privileges, not soft privileges), i.e. ring0, then
it will immediately take control over the machine, and the PC will
crash immediately. If you don't give it privileges (i.e. ring3), it
will fail immediately because of un-privileged machine commands (which
any kernel must use).
There are two options to bypass this problem: One is by giving limited
privileges to the guest, and tracing it. Anytime it faces an illegal
command, an exception happens, and the monitor redirects it to a
special code to deal with it. The problem is that this method is very
heavy, even if some caching tricks are used (as VMware does).
The second method is to replace all the "dangerous" commands of the
guest by JSR commands with a procedure which simulates the required
action, but run it with full privileges. This method is used by Merge
(Win4Lin), and is much efficient, but requires special tables for
replacing commands in binary files of the guest OS by other commands.
All of this means that you depend on very specific versions of Windows,
and at least as far as Win2000 is not one of them, don't even hope for
Hebrew version of Windows. After Win2000 is supported (which may take
even years), Hebrew will become possible, because Win2000 is multi-
lingiual.
at 1998, before VMware was founded, I tried to build a special table
for Hebrew, by disassembling some binary files of Windows (IIRC,
kernel386.exe and kernel32.dll), but cancelled this experiment at the
end of that year, when I heard firstly about VMware. I immediately
understood that this product doesn't have any chance to survive against
VMware, although VMware hardware requirements must be much higher.
--
Eli Marmor
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