Re: [Qemu-devel] OT: Running qemu without host os?

[Karl Magdsick <kmagnum@gmail.com>]

> 
> If you had qemu running multiple OSes, and all of them could access the same
> hardware "virtually directly", that would be simply amazing. Not quite sure
> how one could go about doing this though..
> 

Unless all of the guest OSes were modified to be aware that they were
sharing hardware (or else some really intelligent dynamic patching was
going on), the OSes would step all over eachother.  For instance, one
guest OS might put the NIC in promiscuous mode right before another
guest OS boots and re-initializes the NIC to non-promiscuous mode.  A
third guest OS might then change the MAC address on the NIC and screw
up ARP.

However, your idea isn't that much different from the (fairly new)
exokernel concept, where each process has its own copy of virtualized
hardware, with simulated direct access from userspace, and each
process has its own drivers.  My understanding is that the drivers
would usually be implemented as dynamic libraries, so most of the
applications would actually be sharing driver implementations.


-Karl