2009/6/12 Pontus Pihlgren <pontus at update.uu.se>:
On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 08:40:19AM -0700, Cameron
Kaiser wrote:
I agree, but then there's also the dividing
line between a VM and
virtualization. Actually, I'm not surprised to hear that some emulation
had to be done for x86 originally -- the ISA certainly doesn't lend itself
well to virtualizing out of the box ;-)
Someone told me that VMware still emulates some of the instructions that
could be virtualized either because they are buggy or slow. Don't take
my word for it though.
As far as I know, VMware still doesn't use the hardware emulation in
modern Intel & AMD chips. They firmly believe that their own approach
is more powerful and offers better performance.
I believe VirtualBox also has its own, different approach to x86
virtualisation, involving forcing Ring 0 code in guests into the
seldom-used-on-x86 Ring 1, whereas user code normally runs in Ring 3
or something. I am not an expert in the minutiae of this stuff, I'm
afraid.
(Although when I interrogated Connectix about VirtualPC about 10y back
(with my journalist hat on) they were so thrown by my deep-tech
questions that they flew Jon Garber, the Connectix founder and chief
scientist, over the Britain to talk to me. That was fun and very
interesting indeed.)
--
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