AW: emulating Windows

["Niels Dettenbach" <nd%syndicat.com@localhost>]

Hmmm,

this higly depends from your needs.

With wine - as (afaik) a windows API emulator - do you have no full "windows 
support", but you should be able to run a lot of - but not all - windows apps 
(i never tried Wine under netbsd) and you have no hardware virtualization 
overhead.

If you won't dual boot you have different options of virtualization:

1.) NetBSD XEN
This is the only option where you have NetBSD as the hypervisor - means 
"directly on your hardware". You should have a CPU with virtualization 
functionality like Intel VT.

2.) NetBSD/QEMU? => sorry, i have no experiences with qemu under NetBSD

3.) Linux Hypervisor with
        a.) Xen / HVM (open source) 
        b.) QEMU (open source)
        c.) VirtualBOX (partly open source)
        d.) VMware (commercial)

Personally i hardly prefer XEN because of the performance especially under 
para-virtualization (but i mainly use systems which could be runned 
para-virtualized like NetBSD and Linux) and - not at least - it is very small. 
So i.e. NetBSD under NetBSD/Xen runs very smoth. For MS Windows may other 
solutions a better / faster choice.

If you need USB functionality and graphic acceleration (i.e. 3D) within your 
windows afaik you currently need a desktop virtualization which is only 
available als closed source (Virtualbox-Bin) or commercial (VMware) and NOT for 
NetBSD as a Hypervisor.

With Wine you may have problems with access to different hardware / 
functionality. While a lot of well known software solutions (like MS Office, 
Adobe Photoshop etc.) works well many special (even small) windows programs 
won't work. If you have an older PC and just a few windows programs you rely on 
Wine should be the best choice.

May be this thread may helps you (NetBSD/Xen/Windows):
http://www.mail-archive.com/bsd-india%bsd-india.org@localhost/msg00306.html

Good luck and
best regards,

Niels.
---
Niels Dettenbach
http://www.syndicat.com

-- Urspr. Mitt. --
Betreff: emulating Windows
Von: "Larson, Timothy E." <TELarson%west.com@localhost>
Datum: 25.07.2009 00:14

So what do you use when you need to run Windows?  Any advice or recommendations?

Thanks,
Tim