Re: running Windows (albeit slowly)

[David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@blueyonder.co.uk>]

Mark Williamson wrote:
>> Under the opinion that there is no crime if optimization fails on 
>> incorrect code, would it not be appropriate to do all the things 
>> necessary to run Windows unmodified albeit poorly slash slowly?
> 
> It's not just that the modifications improve performance, guests 
> actually need to be modified to work on Xen at all.

Supporting full virtualization on x86 is *much* more complicated
than Xen-style paravirtualization, mainly because the x86 has some
instructions that are not privileged, but reveal state that needs to
be virtualized.

> When Intel's VT extensions come out, supporting unmodified guests will 
> be rather easier.

Is there any information available on what the extensions will be?

> Yeah, speech recognition on Linux (and others) is a bit of a pain.

There was recently a big fanfare about IBM open-sourcing some of their
speech recognition code, but I don't know how much development it needs.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@blueyonder.co.uk>



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