Re: Vmware was Re: Announcing shell machine availability for dragonfly developers

[Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Kent Ibbetson wrote:

> > Vmware is an excellent product, although expensive.  I haven't tried
> > Bochs but I imagine that would also work (although at a far lower speed)
> > and it's OSS.

> I can vouch for bochs, it works quite well on a 1Ghz Celeron.  You can even
> compile it with a remote gdb stub - essential for this kind of work.

Also take a look at QEMU, which uses dynamic translation to
virtualise the system.  QEMU achieves around 25% of native
speed, despite being fully emulated...

It also makes it way easier to debug a kernel then using eg.
vmware, because you can more easily look inside the qemu
virtual machine.  The disadvantage is that QEMU doesn't yet
do full MMU emulation, which means you need to build a
special kernel to use with QEMU (different address space
layout, but that's basically it).

http://freshmeat.net/projects/qemu/?topic_id=74

Rik
-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan