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ALS 2000 Abstract
Plex86: an i80x86 Virtual Machine
Kevin Lawton, MandrakeSoft, Inc.
Abstract
What is virtualization ?
It is desirable to be able to run multiple operating systems simultaneously:
-in order to simultaneously run application software written for di erent operating systems
-in order to debug system software using a fully equipped host debugging environment
-in order to consolidate management of a great number of heterogeneous PC environments in an enterprise to a small set of virtual machine servers.
One could attempt to emulate the complete hardware
environment | BOCHS
-Pro: works on any platform, emulators are portable
-Con: this is very slow
One could attempt to emulate the API of the different
operating systems | WINE, UML
-This requires the host platform to be the same as the platform of the emulated operating system
-The emulated API needs to be fully documented, which is not the case for most commercial systems
The intermediate solution is virtualization | plex86
-Emulate instructions in the guest OS which access
features which can not be used concurrently with the
host OS
*The peripheral devices
*System instructions
-Create an environment which will allow all other
instructions to be executed natively by the processor
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