Re: kvm86 kernel option

[David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost>]

On Tue, May 08, 2012 at 11:20:31PM +0200, Jean-Yves Migeon wrote:
> Le 08/05/12 19:24, David Laight a ?crit :
> >I was looking at the code that allows an application to run in
> >'viritual 8086 mode', not anything that might allow a 'normal'
> >application to make bios calls - although that couls have it's
> >own security risks.
> 
> Okay, misunderstood your suggestion :)
> 
> I can only think of one obstacle before doing that then: real mode 
> support under VMs.
> 
> I do not know how much support is required from dom0 nowadays, 
> especially with Intel's hardware virtualization (which does not support 
> running VMs in real mode "easily").
> 
> IIRC, Xen introduced a real mode emulator around Xen 3.2 so they can 
> support a wider range of guest HVMs. I doubt that it has to rely on 
> v8086 mode from dom0, but this should be checked anyway.

The xorg code also uses an emulator to execute video bios calls.
wine doesn't use it.
dosbox & dosemu comtain emulators, apparantly DOSBOX is too slow to run
Settlers 2 and Screamer 2! dosemu being 20 times faster.

        David

-- 
David Laight: david%l8s.co.uk@localhost