Zen and Virtualization [was Re: Intuit Software (Quickbooks etc) under Linux?]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Ivan Avery Frey <ivan.frey-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>

| The current release of Xen is supposed to allow WinXP to run as an unmodified
| guest os on CPUs with virtualization technologies such as Intel's Vanderpool
| (P4 662 or 672), Silvervale (Vanderpool for servers available this fall), or
| AMD's Pacifica (available this spring supposedly).

Yes.  The most attractive available CPUs with "VT" (as Intel calls it)
are the 9xx series of Pentium Ds.

But the machines I have with WinXP licences are all AMD.  None have
virtualization hardware.

Zen can utilize VT to do virtualization of an unmodified WinXP.  But
that WinXP probably has to use the devices that Zen simulates.

[Educated Guess Mode]

If you think that virtualizing a CPU is hard, try (self-)virtualizing
a video card.  It is easy to provide a virtual video card, but it is
hard to provide a virtual video card identical to the native one.
Multiply that by all the kinds of video cards available -- each is a
separate puzzle to crack; few have open specifications.  So I'm pretty
sure that Xen must provide a virtual video card, one that matches a
particular real video card that is well-known, old, simple, and
unaccelerated.

The host OS (machine 0) would have native access to the hardware.  But
I don't think that WinXP can fulfill that function and even if it
could, I would not use it as such.

So: I don't think that the pre-installed WinXP has a hope of actually
being used in a virtual machine where the host OS in Linux.  Unless
WinXP is willing to see many of the devices change between boots
(video, ethernet at least).

| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization_technology

wikipedia is a great resource.
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