[WBEL-users] VMWare

[Luke Scharf]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 23:44, Edward Rudd wrote:
> it works like a real machine.. it has a Phoenix bios, emulates a SB PCI
> sound card, an IDE bus w/ cdrom and harddrives, or the harddrives can
> run over one of two emulated SCSI controllers. and it emulates a USB
> interface and an amd pcnet32 NIC.  The video card it emulates is a
> generic VESA 2.0, and there are VMWare specific drivers for windows,
> linux, and freebsd guests.

One thing I'd like to add, though, is that it *is* distinguishable from
a real machine.

When you try to run some Windows games inside VMWare, they'll say
something to the effect of "please don't run me in a debugger".

As near as I can figger it, the instructions for the guest OS and
software are running natively, but VMWare is really written like a
debugger.  But, when a normal debugger would point to a section of the
code, VMWare jumps into action and simulates part of the guest-hardware
or does whatever else needs to be done.

At least that's my feel for how it works.  While VMWare is a great tool
and is certainly worth the money, it is closed source.  I can't *really*
find out how it works.

Also, it will install some kernel modules.  That means that you have to
run vmware-config.pl every time you update the kernel.  That's fine for
my Linux machine at home, but not so good if I were to install it in a
computer lab.

I hope this helps!
-Luke