[Qemu-devel] Qemu is a wonderful (and presentation)

[Stefano Marinelli <postnet@dragas.dyndns.org>]

Hello everybody, I'm a Computer Sciences student at Bologna's university
(Italy) and I'm doing a research about Virtual Machines and their
application. My final thesis will be about it. I've spent the last month
performing tests with bochs and plex86 (the new one) but I've found out
that bochs is too slow (even if almost complete) while plex has good
ideas, but is still in really alpha stage. I've put an eye on qemu and
found out it could be the best project to work with. I like the fact
that it can be used to emulate x86 machines on non-x86 environments,
especially because universities often have machines like PPC and Sparc.
Anyway, I've performed some tests with the vl and created some new
initrd images in order to see the state of compatibility. Being a so
young project, I didn't expect too much, but I'm amazed. It's good, the
user emulation performs well, the System emulator shows a good project
idea, so I think it has the possibility to become a good alternative to
bochs.
One of the things I matter more is the "guest" portability: looking at
the documentations, seems that one day it will be possible to run other
non-Linux operating systems. My task is to prepare a bunch of virtual
machine, where students (also normal users, but I'm talking about
University research) will be able to experiment with different operating
systems, both "secure" and "insecure" ones (like old Windows 98),
without having to sacrifice a physical machine. Bochs could be a
solution, but it's soooo slow. The idea beyond the dynamic translation
is great. 
I had great expectations with bochs+plex86, but Kevin said that it will
be the last thing to be done, even because the guest kernel has to be
modified (and I don't like too much the host kernel driver to be
installed)
So the question is: will one day be possible to run other x86
operating systems (like the *BSD, Windows, BeOS and so on)?
I hope so, anyway I will like to work on the project as final thesis.
Ok, thanks for your attention (my email has been soo long) and good work
:)

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Stefano Marinelli
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