[Techtalk] Windows emulation (was Politeness and the purpose of Techtalk)

[David Sumbler]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Val Henson wrote:

> On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 05:01:31 -0500, Lee <lnx at alltel.net> wrote:
>> Hi Friends..
>> I'm curious as to how ya'll on this list, if ya'll do, get to windows
>> programs. Win4Lin, VmWare(pricey?)..or wine perhaps..what's the popular mode
>> of transportation here..or perhaps there's some program I don't know about..
>
> Has anyone on the list tried qemu?  It's supposed be a fast, free full
> system emulator (as well as userland only).  It's also ported to more
> than one architecture.  I haven't personally used it, but lots of
> smart people I know are excited by it.

Yes, I have used it - not extensively, but it seems to be quite simply
brilliant!

I also tried bochs, but it is rather slow.

Qemu, on the other hand is fast - I think the benchmarks suggest that
it emulates a processor at between 4 and 10 times its actual rate
(depending on the task).  This should mean that Windows (or anything)
would run faster on my current 1.5GHz machine than on my old 233MHz
laptop, and this seems to be borne out in practice.

The only difficulty is in exchanging data between the qemu "partition"
(which is actually a file) and the Linux partitions.  In theory it
ought to be possible using Samba, but I think that there may be
difficulties there.  I haven't gone into it sufficiently far to be
able to say anything useful on that, but there is a mailing list or
forum which has quite a lot of discussion of the subject.

David

--