On Tuesday 02 March 2004 11:12 am, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
Is it really a virtual machine architecture? I guess that's why they call it _V_M_ ware, eh? I assume VMware sits on top of the chip, and intercepts the calls from the two OS's and parcels out the resources as it sees fit. If everybody involved were playing nicely together, it wouldn't bother me. It's just that Bill always seem to be trying to break such things.
About a year back, Sun filed suit for a $Billion U.S. because XP broke Java. That /is/ 10.00^9.
How does it deal with network connections, and other potentially competing resources?
I think you're making it much more complicated than it really is. Many hardware architectures provide for a virtual mode, where the memory is mapped/translated so that it appears to the VM that it has been loaded at address 0. The host (linux in this case) pages the virtual memory and the hardware does the address translations. So far so good... and the only thing (a big generalization) that needs to be added is the ability to do 'low level' stuff such as disk IO, network stuff, etc. This is where VMware comes in. Whenever Win98 (for example) tries to make a call to do hardware types of things, i.e. things that a normal user program wouldn't be allowed to do, an interrupt is created and that interrupt goes to VMware which can simulate the disk IO as an example. Thus, Win98 can be writing to a reiserfs disk file which in fact, it knows nothing about reiserfs. VMware handles all the disk calls. Same for networking and other calls. But yes, it is truely a virtual architecture which can be seen when installing windows into VMware. You have to do all of the normal things you would do on the real hardware... make partitions, format them, boot from a floppy, etc. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Bruce S. Marshall bmarsh@bmarsh.com Bellaire, MI 03/02/04 11:17 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "Neuroses are red, Melancholia's blue, I'm schizophrenic, What are you?"