Re: LUNI: source for cheap used computers

Actually, I think you meant 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_processors 

but I wouldn't have found it if I hadn't gone to the page for ARM processors. ;-) 

I've never run virtualziation on X86, only on mainframes, so if I list VMWare or Xen, it's just because those are names I've heard bandied about. When I get the hardware, then I;ll worry about which software to use. I also want a TRS-80 emulator, as that was my first love.... 

I don't care, but I believe, that if you run windows under virtualbox, then technically Bill Gates can "sue you and take your house, your car and your wife" (that was what my business law teacher always said), because I believe the legalize you agreed to promised you would not disassemble their code, and VB does that. 

I guess I am scared about "code scanning" especially given the complexity of the x86 instruction set, and guessing where an instruction starts can change everything. If they don't find one of the untrapped ring 1 instructions, there is one kind of error, and more timeing delays in emulation could cause another type of error, and who knows what else. Branching to another location to run different instructions? Could they guess wrong about where to jump to and have that code get overlaid? what if the emulated program reloads that code during operatoin, and the jump to another location is lost? Sorry, that is scarry to me. 

Now that I see VB needs virtualization hardware to do it, I DO want to run my old OS2 software that I never had a powerful enough computer to do back at the time (well, couldn't afford a good enough second computer to install it on);.. 

The mainframes I used have/had a very slick, foolproof virtualization scheme, such that one other mainframe operating system actually ran FASTER (under many workloads) under virtualization than natively. And you could next virtual levels of the main virtualiztion operating system many levels deep. Can you run windows under virtual box, under virtual box, under virtual box, under virtual box, on the hardware? 

--Carey 

----- "Jeff Yamada" <[email protected]> wrote: 


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture 

Maybe some of the stuff you referred to before was relevant only to 
'hardware' virtualization. Some software solutions like VirtualBox 
will probably work out for you, well depending on what OSs are 
involved and what you want out of your VMs. 
http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch10.html#hwvirt 
"...VirtualBox does not require hardware virtualization features to be 
present. Through sophisticated techniques, VirtualBox virtualizes many 
guest operating systems entirely in software. This means that you can 
run virtual machines even on older processors which do not support 
hardware virtualization." 

You mentioned VMware previously and I've only used VirtualBox so 
hopefully someone else on the list has had more experience with 
various VM applications. 
Jeff

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