Talk:VMware
Opinionated
As per the quote:
I found VMware emulates very accurate real hardware behaviors, at good speed (especially with Intel-VT or AMD-V)
This has more promotional value than factual value. Define "good speed" - is it worse or better than QEmu, worse or better than VirtualPC, worse or better than VirtualBox? Similarly define "very accurate emulation" - VMWare used to have rather poor graphics abilities, enough to put it below Bochs and Qemu on that matter (which have a nice collection of issues of themselves), and thus way beyond VirtualPC which so far proved to be the most accurate in that area. Is all that still the case? I think some facts should be added, or alternatively, these phrases be removed. - Combuster 16:02, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
- As far as facts go, I ran my VGA test suite on VMWare and compared the results:
- VMWare doesn't support all resolutions
- VMWare has very poor accuracy, only enough to support standard VGA modes. In quality it barely breaks even with Bochs, and is way behind VirtualPC
- VMWare emulates the VGA extremely slow, far worse than my default Bochs configuration. Extrapolated, Bochs would have to be set to emulate a ~900KHz processor in order to match VMWare on my Athlon64 machine (and yes, the units are correct!).
- Based on the above and the lack of replies, I will now remove the propaganda. - Combuster 23:31, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
VMWare on 64-bit windows
I removed this line:
- Note: On 64-bit Windows systems using AMD processors, a patch is required for virtual machines to function correctly. The patch can be downloaded from Microsoft
I would like it to be put back in the article but I would like some clarifications first. First it should mention AMD-V. Secondly, will VMWare function incorrectly? or just not use hardware-assisted virtualization? If incorrectly I'm curious to how so? -Jhawthorn 03:26, 17 March 2007 (CDT)
By "function incorrectly," I meant the program will crash when a virtual machine is started (oddly enough, this only happens about half the time). VMWare isn't using machine-assisted virtualization without this patch, but my understanding is that it relies on it for some of its functionality on the AMD64 platform. After installing the patch, I no longer had stability issues, and observed an enormous performance boost. --speal 03:52, 20 March 2007 (CDT)
I haven't had a chance to write up a detailed description of the problem, but I stumbled onto an article at pagetable.com. It seems to describe the exact issue I had, and explains why I was able to run several other hobby OSes under vmware without any performance or stability issues. --speal