[Qemu-devel] Re: RFC for new features

[Emmanuel Charpentier <charpent@bacbuc.dyndns.org>]

Fabrice Bellard wrote:

[ that he wants our whishlists before porting the SDL version to other 
platforms. ]

Well, I have some wishes, but I'm not sure they fit well in your current 
worplans. Please feel free to discard them :

1) There are still some CPU emulation issues ; I can't diagnose them but I 
can prove that they exist :
	After Win2k installation (whatever version), I have been unable to install 
Mozilla 1.6. I have been able to install Mozilla 1.7, though. Windows being 
... well, Windows, I've been unable to locate error logs. Go figure ...
	It tool me 4 trials to find a Win2k version that would allow for the 
installation of Office 2000. I tried to install Office 97 twice, with no 
luck. I didn't retry with the "correct" installation of Win2k.
	The SP4 patch doesn't install (error a short while after unpacking)
	The "disk full" issue while installing Win2k still happens every time.

None of this happens using the very same files/disks while installing on 
real hardware.

2) There are device emulation issues :
	The current cirrusvga is a vast improvement over the previous bochs 
device. However, pushing available memory to more than 4 Mb wold allow for 
better resolutions : 1024x768x16 is a bit limiting in some uses.
	There are still serious issues with audio emulation. The current SB16/AXE 
device can do simple things (playing the "opening" .wav file, etc ...), but 
trying to install Dragon voice recognition still fails very early (at the 
first sound that the installer tries to play), and crashes the whole 
emulation (the graphics window diseappear, and you're left with no mouse).

3) I still think that a virtualizer based on QEMU, while quite a bit more 
limited in scope than QEMU itself, would be extremely useful : letting 
user-level code not touching hardware run native and trapping anything 
related to I/O, memory-mapped I/O or changing protection level (allowing to 
run *that* on the emulated CPU) would allow for a nice acceleration. This 
would be a boon for all the people using QEMU to run hardware available for 
their CPU but not their platform (think Windows user running Linux/FreeBSD 
software and vice-versa), which may well be a majority among qemu users.

None of this is absolutely critical, and QEMU is already *extremely* 
useable (and useful ! ) as it is. The most critical are probably the CPU 
emulation issues, the least the virtualizer.

Hope this helps,

					Emmanuel Charpentier