Re: [9front] hackathon writeup

[Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 12:37:04AM +0100, Stuart Morrow wrote:
> And VMX doesn't run on my X301 even though virtualisation
> exists on Core 2 Duo (and is/was enabled in the BIOS).

VMX requires a Westmere or newer Intel processor.  The earliest
generation of Thinkpad X series laptop to support this is the X230, a
machine otherwise roundly inferior to the X301.  Core 2 Duo chips
support the VT-d instructions but not EPT or unrestricted guests.

> And people run 9front on hardware that doesn't have virtualisation
> at all.

With the possible exception of the Ryzen line, hardware too old to
support virtualization is unlikely to run linuxemu at an acceptable
speed.  As for User-Mode Linux, it's single-cpu and doesn't support
anything but x86-based processors either.  (Sure, it works on Itanium
and PowerPC, but 9front doesn't.)  

The syscalls problem isn't that we don't know which ones to implement,
it's that Linux creates and deprecates them at a rate faster than anyone
can keep up with.  I am positive this is the case worldwide, not just
for us -- otherwise, things like Docker on OS X would not virtualize an
entire OS just to make use of Linux containers.  The engineering cost to
virtualize a platform and boot Linux on it is lower than the engineering
cost to keep up with whatever the hell the Linux horde throws at the
kernel this week.

khm