Do I see ice crystals forming in Hell?
Microsoft tweaks Windows 10 on Arm64 to play nicely with KVM
A funny thing has happened on the way to 19H1: an Azure OS kernel engineer tweaked Windows 10 to make the operating system considerably more KVM-friendly. Reg reader Waseem drew our attention to a GitHub thread, which consisted mostly of FOSS fans working on the drivers needed to get the Arm version of Windows 10 up and …
COMMENTS
-
-
Monday 11th March 2019 13:24 GMT A.P. Veening
"Do I see ice crystals forming in Hell?"
No, you don't as those have been there for the last 1,000 years at least. Hell has always been a cold place, the old Norse mythology is correct in that regard. The idea of hell as a hot place comes from some ancient desert dwellers, who lacked the imagination that cold could be unpleasant.
-
-
-
Monday 11th March 2019 16:12 GMT karlkarl
KVM is making QEMU shoddy
QEmu is one of the best ways to run old operating systems for digital preservation but companies obsessed with "current" Linux or virtualization are messing up the codebase a little.
So little work is done for QEmu for older OSes. For example until recently QEmu had an issue on DOS with reading from the keyboard when DJGPP's DPMI manager is loaded. If we are not correctly reading from virtual hardware at this point, adding layers upon layers is going to start making it pretty flaky.
Likewise trying to boot i.e older UNIX like Solaris 9 is pretty awkward. So I can't say QEmu is exactly keeping to the x86 spec.
Yes its hard but I am surprised less people are interested in keeping legacy history working.
-
Monday 11th March 2019 16:21 GMT Waseem Alkurdi
Re: KVM is making QEMU shoddy
A good response to this is that QEMU is kept under Git source control. One can get the "last known good" build (without KVM), fork it into a new branch, say "QEMU Legacy", and develop onto that.
That's how many open source projects started ... fork for keeping legacy compatibility (MATE started as a GNOME 2 fork in response to GNOME 3).
-
Tuesday 12th March 2019 17:27 GMT bombastic bob
Re: KVM is making QEMU shoddy
yeah, forking _might_ fix things, or restore compatibility. But what worries me is THIS (from the article):
"The Insider team itself merely pointed out there were some new emojis – rather than explaining Microsoft had taken the step of spotting a problem in the OS that was stopping it working with a popular FOSS component and getting the code tweaked in a matter of weeks."
They *FEEL* (not think) that _EMOJIS_ are more important than KERNEL FIXES??? Well, from this, it would seem that this is the case... (and I _think_ that emojis are a faddish cancer, like 70's disco "music" - 110bpm 'thunka thunka' for EVERY song, with 2 or maybe even 3 chords for anything NOT written by 'Earth Wind and Fire', heavily repeated like code you did copy/pasta with instead of writing a function, and pounded into your head and pressed out of plastic and over-played on radio "until you like it" and IT! JUST! REFUSED! TO! DIE! even after being spectacularly blown up by DJs like Steve Dahl, but I digress)
Worth pointing out also, virtualbox STARTED as a QEMU fork and the first really cool feature they added: multi-core support!
(is that in QEMU yet? I haven't messed with QEMU at 'that level' in a while)
-
Wednesday 13th March 2019 08:47 GMT Waseem Alkurdi
Re: KVM is making QEMU shoddy
They *FEEL* (not think) that _EMOJIS_ are more important than KERNEL FIXES???
To a PR entity facing lusers (the "Insider Team"), they are more important! (see icon)
And while emojis are a fad, they actually help communicating the emotion associated with some sentence, to prevent a joke from being taken seriously, to point out one example. I used to hate them, but not any longer.
VirtualBox uses QEMU code, but is not a QEMU fork. While VirtualBox is faster, QEMU actually adheres to the UNIX philosophy (the "do one thing and do it well" one). VirtualBox IMO is the systemd of virtualization.
And yep, you can specify multiple cores, with a number of cores that can be higher than the host (the option is -smp <NUMBER>.
-
-
-