On 5/16/06, James Ausmus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Nope - VMWare doesn't give the guest OS a hardware copy of what the host machine is - it does software emulation of the entire computer - BIOS, CPU, Video Card, Hard Drive (unless you go for RAW access to a specified hard drive), sound, etc etc. IIRC the CPU it emulates is a Pentium-III - don't remember how fast...
No no no....this is just wrong. VMware does virtualize most of the hardware...sound cards, networking, hard drives, and so on. But the CPU is mostly native. There are few flags that get clobbered so it can show a single processor on a dual-core box or the like, and a few instructions that have to be emulated with a call to the host, but generally the guest code runs natively on the processor. This is what makes VMWare so much faster than something that actually does emulate a processor like qemu. This means that you *might* be able to run a 64-bit Gentoo guest on a 32-bit WinXP host. http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/releasenotes_ws55.html -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
