Re: win4lin-like porting of win98 to xen?

[Steven Hand <Steven.Hand@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

>Avery Pennarun wrote:
>
>> A free win4lin (ie. rewriting all those drivers) would be a *massive* amount
>> of work.  Fun, but a lot of work.  And it gets more and more obsolete each
>> day.  Lots of stuff still runs under win98, but it's certainly not a target
>> platform for modern developers.
>
>Actually I thought that, perhaps, much of the work from the WinXP port
>could be adapted to a Win98 snap-in port? 

There's almost no similarity between win98 and XP at the kernel level. 

>(As I understand, the WinXP structure is so different that a snap-in
>port for it without breaking some MS license would be impossible.
>Otherwise you'd have done it already ;).

Any port of XP which results in a modified binary of any sort is 
at the very least unsupported by MS (including for example running 
XP on VMWare). And anything based on modified XP source will have 
limited or zero distribution prospects. 

>From reading this thread my opinion is that our best bets are: 

  1. work on getting a ReactOS port, and/or 
  2. wait for Intel's VT which may (or may not - I have only IDF 
     announcements to go on) make unmodified XP support an option. 

Anyone from ReactOS here (or familiar with it) want to take a stab? 

cheers,

S.


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