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Re: [Xen-devel] win4lin-like porting of win98 to xen?



I have a question. If it's dumb, I apologize in advance ;)

No, it's a good question.

There is one previous successful attempt to do "partial virtualization",
adapting the guest OS to increase performance. It's Win4Lin, and they
adapted win9x by installing drivers.

The Win4Lin approach installs drivers for "virtual devices", like Xen does from disk and network. It also pretends to Win9x that it's somehow running on DOS and emulates the DOS syscalls Windows needs to run. The Win4Lin host kernel patch adds support for these syscalls.

So, is this possible?

One could imagine some sort of minimal OS that provides enough functionality for Win9x to run on by emulating DOS-like functionality. That'd be kinda cool but the straightforward approach would be to get the Win4Lin patch to apply to XenLinux - it should be possible to do this with some work. I think somebody's trying it at the moment - there's a recent thread on this in the mailing list archives, which you may find relevant.

HTH,

Mark


Yours, Mikhail Ramendik





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