Re: [Qemu-devel] What can qemu do that vmware/virtual pc can't...article idea

[Bill C. Riemers]

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 <address@hidden> 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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