9fans - fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* Re: [9fans] VMWare and OS Research
@ 2002-09-30 17:58 Russ Cox
  2002-09-30 22:29 ` Jim Choate
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 3+ messages in thread
From: Russ Cox @ 2002-09-30 17:58 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

> How much do you think VMWare is going to impact OS research?

Anyone building a new x86 OS today would be a fool
not to start by doing it on top of VMware.  It's just
so much easier than working on real boxes.  The only
reason I can think of not to use VMware is if you were
trying to build something like a microkernel where you
care about every little architecture trick and the
associated speed benefits.  (VMware implements the tricks,
they just might not have the usual costs.)

It's still nice to run on the bare hardware, though.
Compiling is an order of magnitude faster that way,
mainly because there are so many context switches to
kfs and back.  (Using a network file server might
help here quite a bit; I haven't measured that.)

Russ


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] VMWare and OS Research
  2002-09-30 17:58 [9fans] VMWare and OS Research Russ Cox
@ 2002-09-30 22:29 ` Jim Choate
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Jim Choate @ 2002-09-30 22:29 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans


On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Russ Cox wrote:

> > How much do you think VMWare is going to impact OS research?
>
> Anyone building a new x86 OS today would be a fool

So much for tact.


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

    We don't see things as they are,                      ravage@ssz.com
    we see them as we are.                                   www.ssz.com
                                                  jchoate@open-forge.org
    Anais Nin                                         www.open-forge.org

    --------------------------------------------------------------------



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread

* [9fans] VMWare and OS Research
  2002-09-30  5:41 [9fans] hangar 18 Russ Cox
@ 2002-09-30 15:06 ` Jack Johnson
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Jack Johnson @ 2002-09-30 15:06 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

Russ Cox wrote:
> If I got my own way
> all the time, there would be large teams of people getting paid to
> write drivers, so I would never have to write another.

How much do you think VMWare is going to impact OS research?

I look at the work that's done on the BSDs and Linux because the driver
base is there, but it seems that for people doing lower-level work,
there's a lot to be said for using VMWare if your research or interests
lie somewhere other than driver development, or if nothing else as a
proof-of-concept before diving into driver hell but without supporting
decaying hardware along the way.

Does this seem like a plausible future?

-Jack



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2002-09-30 22:29 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 3+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2002-09-30 17:58 [9fans] VMWare and OS Research Russ Cox
2002-09-30 22:29 ` Jim Choate
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2002-09-30  5:41 [9fans] hangar 18 Russ Cox
2002-09-30 15:06 ` [9fans] VMWare and OS Research Jack Johnson

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).