[Qemu-devel] Massive improvements in Feb. 10 CVS

[Starsong Nemo <starsong.nemo@gmail.com>]

Hello all,

I've used QEMU in the past but have been frustrated by random crashes
and strange Windows installation errors.  I tried the Feb. 10 CVS
version of QEMU, right after Mr. Bellard added the new kernel module. 
The improvement over previous versions I tried (last month) is
fantastic, not just in speed but in stability.  I was so impressed I
thought people might be interested to hear what seems to be working in
this version.  Apologies if this seems long or if the
problems/sucesses are known.

QEMU compilation went OK, but I had to comment out line 580 in
linux-user/syscall.c ("case SO_BSDCOMPAT:") or it barfed.

Host system: Dual Athlon 2600+ running Suse Linux 9.2
(2.6.8-24.11-smp), 1G physical memory

Guest: Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 slipstream (XPCREATE) onto 3G "raw"
format, 384M memory
Installation took ~2 hours, 1 error in final configuration stages
(rundll32 crash).  Seemingly no ill effects.  The rest of the
installation went flawlessly.

What works:
-Windows Update (finally! Retrieved and installed all 38 critical updates)
-Standard Windows builtins like Internet Explorer 6, utilities, games
-Microsoft Office 2000 (Word, Excel, Outlook installed and worked fine)
-Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0
-Mozilla Firefox 1.0
-Java SDK (J2SE 5.0) and the Netbeans 4.0 IDE.  Example applets
compile & run.  This is, however, quite slow. :)
-QEMU 0.6.1 for Windows (!!) from http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/
with the included 10M linux image

What doesn't:
-If display size is set to 800x600 the screen is corrupted; there are
thick vertical or horizontal bars.  640x480 and 1024x768 work fine,
although sometimes when switching color depths the corruption appears.
-Timing seems off in some applications; the animations in Firefox
(progress bar fade-in, the "Download Complete" message which pops up
from the taskbar) take about 2-3 times longer to complete than usual. 
I don't know if this is a real timing issue or just a slowdown due to
the emulation.  Ordinary Windows effects (menu fade-in, etc) work
fine.

Guest: Windows 98 (first edition) onto 2G "raw" format, 384M memory
Installation still generates unstoppable "Insert Windows 98 CD"
message when trying to format the drive.  Manually formatted and the
error went away.  No other error messages in install process.  Upon
restart, crashes with "Windows Protection Error" ONLY IF kqemu is
used.  Starting with -no-kqemu makes the error go away and it boots
fine.

What works:
-Windows Update, including update to Internet Explorer 6SP1
-Microsoft Office 2000
-3D racing game "POD" works in software mode (I had it on my shelf and
figured what the hell).  However, it can't access the CD audio tracks.
 Runs at 2-3 FPS.  Ouch.

There are a bunch of sb16 warnings in the console I'm running QEMU
from, but sound works fine.  Again, congratulations on the success of
the KQEMU module.  If this is the alpha version I can't wait for the
beta.

SS