It seems to me you missed the most important qemu feature.  That is qemu
will emulate different processors.  Just try running an PPC version of Linux
on an x86 with VMWARE.  To my knowledge the only other programs that can do
this are either very expensive or extremely slow.

Bill


On 7/28/06, Udo 'Robos' Puetz <udo@muon.de> wrote:
>
> Hi List.
> I'm in contact with one of the writers for the german (large) computer
> magazine c't (computer and technology) defending qemu (he neglected some
> features qemu has in one of his articles). Now he asks me for an article
> about what the "average user" would benefit from when he would use qemu
> instead
> of virtual pc/vmware (their "free" products, like player, ESX ...). The
> examples I named up to now where
> qemu -nographic -hda linux.img -kernel linux-2.6.17.6
> /arch/i386/boot/bzImage
> -append "console=ttyS0
> root=/dev/hda ide2=noprobe ide3=noprobe ide4=noprobe ide5=noprobe" -hdb
> fat:/mnt/data/Projekte/qemu/linux-test/bla
> doing a little linux kernel driver development learning this way. (Good
> free
> pdf over at oreilly)
> Also, when testing OCFS2 (Oracle cluster fs 2) and not having a SAN/iSCSI
> system at hand I tried this:
> qemu -hda breezy.img -hdb ocsf2.img
> mounting that image once
> qemu -hda breezy.img -hdb ocsf2.img
> and now mounting it again in a second instance of qemu with slightly
> different network setup. That works with qemu, vmware desktop wouldn't
> take
> the image a second time.
> Also, a demonstration LiveCD could be made to boot on a system but also to
> be played with qemu/qvm86 under win and linux (kqemu can't be
> re-distributed).
> There would be statically built qemu's on the CD with bat/bash skripts to
> start them (automatically).
> Also, qemu can run happily on the server awaiting connects via vnc. But
> some
> of the free products can do that too.
>
> Soo, do you have any more ideas what qemu can what the (free) alternatives
> from M$/VMWare can't?
> Virtual PC can't handle USB _at_all_, what's the status of USB2.0 with
> qemu
> ( I think VMWare is still stuck on USB 1.1 )?
> VMWare Desktop (not free) has "unlimited" snapshots IIRC, ESX just
> recently
> got one snapshot functionality.
>
> I can't say if I would do the article or the writer for the magazine but
> at
> least it would make qemu more visible to (more technical inclined) people
> ->
> good in my eyes.
> Thanks for your suggestions
> Cheers
> Udo
>
> --
> Robos -
> gpg --recv-keys --keyserver blackhole.pca.dfn.de 6EEADA09
>
>
>
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