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Re: on virtuality (was Re: VMWare)
On Wed, 17 Mar 1999 23:17:43 +0200, Eli Marmor <marmor@elmar.co.il> wrote:
>Udi Finkelstein wrote:
>
>> What's new here is that VMware is the first program not only to make a simple
> ^^^^^
>> sandbox for user programs (like any protected mode O/S does - Linux and NT
>> both do this), but instead it's "sandbox" is actually emulating all the
>> protection violations as if the sandbox is the entire machine, and not one
>> task in many.
>
>Not the first. The second. Locus (now owned by Platinum, the same
>company which also "ate" Memco) was the first, with its revolutionary
>version 4.0 (currently 4.1.1) of "Merge". Unfortunately, they didn't
You are right.But wasn't Merge limited to running 16 Bit apps or O/S, hence
staying in VM86 mode? if so, than it's not in the same league AT ALL. This is
the same as the DOS box in ANY modern x86 protected OS.
>make it available for Linux, but only for some other x86-based
>UNIXes. It must be admitted, though, that VMware is much more
>superior and ambitious than Merge. IMHO, it is the most revolutionary
>product I've ever seen.
We agree on that ...
>> Why wasn't this done before? My guess is that since it's a known fact that the
>> X86 is not truely virtualizable, no one bothered even trying.
>
>The first one to develop the theories about self-virtualizibility,
>was Prof. Popek. But Prof. Popek is also the head of Locus, so you
>can say that he was the first one to "contradict" himself...
The first I know to use self virtualization were IBM with the 360 or 370
series. These mainframes run multiple O/S's simultanously with multiple VM's.
>But even in this point, Merge is inferior: It can run only guest
>OSes which the developers of Merge prepared special tables for them.
.
.
.
So you're saying that MERGE could run in theory a 32 bit O/S? Did it run
Windows 95, or even Win3.1 with Win32S?
>Because of this reason, most of the OSes, including Linux/*BSD*/NT/
>Win98/etc., could not run under Merge. Even localized versions of
>Win95 couldn't run, and before VMware had their first demo (at the
I guess this implies that Windows 95 *did* run on MERGE.
>beginning of 1999), I was busy trying to build a table for the Hebrew
When I first read about VMware in slashdot a month ago, it sounded like a
hoax. It's one of these things that you "know" that can't be done. I'm glad I
was proved wrong!
>> The moment an x86 vendor would offer a variant which is fully virtualizable
>> (and we'll have VMware-like software to take advantage of this mode), I would
>> be the first in line to buy it.
>
>Transmeta?
How could I forget that? (and I'm in the CPU business...)
Udi