It looks more like Bochs to me than plex86 (or even VMWare). The hint is in the
description of the product itself. It says: "
Each virtual computer operates as if it were a stand-alone machine with
its own sound card, video board, network adapter and processor"--meaning that it
emulates everything. To support this they also state: "while still taking
advantage of the latest features of the host OS"--obviously (in context) meaning
that the latest API's and optimized code may be used for user I/O.
My guess is that they are doing the following:
--Filter the guest code
--translate & transform code as needed
--emulate devices (all)
--run all as ring3
--use the windows API to handle any hardware access.
This is pretty much the same strategy that they already use on the Mac version
of Virtual PC.
2.8:1 is pretty damn good though, I bet that they have a few tricks up their
sleeves from building the Mac version first.
(I read the white paper and the downloadable PDF that they have as a promotional
thingy on the site.)
Kevin Lawton wrote:
> Eric Laberge wrote:
>
> > I did some a kernel compilation test with Mandrake 8, using the default
> > kernel configuration.
> > In the virtual machine, running on top of Windows Me, it took 13:47.01
> > minutes, while in the native mode, it only took me 4:55.28 minutes (make
> > dep; time make)
> > It is a quite respectable 2.8:1 score, and the software has a nice GUI :-P
>
> Is this a user space technology or do they have a kernel component also?
>
> For a user space technology, that's pretty good.
>
> > Good job, Connectix.
> > I can't wait to see how the second version of the Plex86 engine compare
> > with this :-)
>
> Me too!
>
> -Kevin
>
> --
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
> Kevin Lawton [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> MandrakeSoft, Inc. Plex86 developer
> http://www.linux-mandrake.com/ http://www.plex86.org/
--
Drew Northup, N1XIM
