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From: "M.A. Williamson" <maw48@cam.ac.uk>
To: Mikhail Ramendik <mr@ramendik.ru>
Cc: xen-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: win4lin-like porting of win98 to xen?
Date: 10 Oct 2004 17:32:34 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <Prayer.1.0.11.0410101732340.31595@hermes-1.csi.cam.ac.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1097425028.2679.5.camel@localhost.localdomain>

> I have a question. If it's dumb, I apologize in advance ;)

No, it's a good question.

> There is one previous successful attempt to do "partial virtualization",
> adapting the guest OS to increase performance. It's Win4Lin, and they
> adapted win9x by installing drivers.

The Win4Lin approach installs drivers for "virtual devices", like Xen does 
from disk and network. It also pretends to Win9x that it's somehow running 
on DOS and emulates the DOS syscalls Windows needs to run. The Win4Lin host 
kernel patch adds support for these syscalls.

> So, is this possible?

One could imagine some sort of minimal OS that provides enough 
functionality for Win9x to run on by emulating DOS-like functionality. 
That'd be kinda cool but the straightforward approach would be to get the 
Win4Lin patch to apply to XenLinux - it should be possible to do this with 
some work. I think somebody's trying it at the moment - there's a recent 
thread on this in the mailing list archives, which you may find relevant.

HTH,

Mark

> 
> Yours, Mikhail Ramendik
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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  reply	other threads:[~2004-10-10 16:32 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2004-10-10 16:17 win4lin-like porting of win98 to xen? Mikhail Ramendik
2004-10-10 16:32 ` M.A. Williamson [this message]
2004-10-10 19:39   ` Mikhail Ramendik
2004-10-10 22:41     ` Mark A. Williamson
2004-10-11  0:05       ` David Hopwood
2004-10-11  0:33         ` Brian Wolfe
2004-10-11  0:38         ` Mark A. Williamson
2004-10-11  1:03           ` Avery Pennarun
2004-10-11  9:05             ` Mikhail Ramendik
2004-10-11  9:21               ` Steven Hand
2004-10-11  1:52           ` David Hopwood
2004-10-11 11:33 Tom Cranbrook

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