On 11/18/2023 11:43 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>
> Yes, that is one of the things I want to know.
>
> If I can find a 32-bit Win7 or Win-10 machine, that would be my
> preference, but if I can't, I want to know what a Virtual Box can and
> cannot do, preferably from someone who had used or is using one.
The VirtualBox BIOS support is pretty basic, and is intended to be
a "facade of sufficient quality to fool most OSes". The legacy BIOS
boot support, I would rate as "good", while booting UEFI OSes,
the bios in VirtualBox in that case is EFI and can have issues.
VirtualBox cannot boot from an emulated USB stick or a passthru USB stick.
It can boot from CD or ISO or emulated HDD (container).
The graphics support isn't exactly something you would want.
I don't game in VirtualBox, and I would not even try that.
There were two additional graphics support mechanisms, which have
either been removed or relabeled. There was passthru video, where
an entire video card was passed to the Guest, but then you'd need
a monitor for the Guest to use. There was also "Experimental DirectX support"
where DirectX commands of some sort were passed to the Host. This
only works (if you can wedge the driver in), on Windows Guest OSes.
> My wife's Win-11 64-bit laptop is far slower than my Win7 laptop was,
> and my Win 7 laptop was in turn far slower than my Win-XP 32-bit
> desktop (on which I'm typing this). I blame that on bloatware.
>
> I might ask her if I can try out one of these virtual box things on
> her computer, but I don't know if that would mean repartitioning her
> hard drive or something of the sort, which might make things even
> worse.
Modern hardware uses closed loop feedback, to control clock multiplier,
VCore setting, thermal limits (throttle so CPU doesn't go over 90C or
99C or whatever), power limits (Vcore never provides more than X watts).
Yet, additional cruft can be added, to make things worse. Windows has
its own scheduler design, but other things can mess with that.
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/windows-10-cpu-throttling.264008/
In the old days, everything ran open-loop. Furmark used to be able
to burn a video card. That's no longer possible, for multiple
reasons. (First reason was a driver limiter, then later the hardware
closed loop control also prevents it.) Even the fan control on a
graphics card has advanced. There was a time, where a "bad" driver,
could stop the fan entirely, causing the GPU to overheat and be
damaged. I would bet a lot of modern cards cannot be damaged that
way either. My 1050TI, the fan hardly ever spins on it, so it
does not appear to have that protection on it. There might be
hardware fan control there, but it's not possible to tell by
looking at it.
>>> People have told me that it is possible to run a virtual machine on a
>>> Win 64-bit computer that will emulate a 32-bit OS, but before I spend
>>> money on a computer that might not work for me, I'd like to hear from
>>> someone who has had experience in running such things, to find out how
>>> well they work.
You can run 64-bit Guests on 32-bit Hosts. I used to do that in WinXP (Host)
and various Guest OSes. That is possible, because the CPU supports 64-bit
instructions, and the Guest 64-bit is passing 64-bit instructions to the
CPU directly. VirtualBox as normally used, is homogenous x86-on-x86 so
a lot of instructions are passed without interpretation, right to the CPU.
If you do an RDTSC (privileged instruction?), maybe that is handled manually
by the VirtualBox software.
You can also run a 64-bit Host OS and run 32-bit Guest OSes.
In other words, you are absolutely limited on homogenous, if the CPU is 32-bit
instructions only (AthlonXP 3200). if the CPU is 64-bit, just about all
combinations are supported.
Heterogenous, like x86-on-Sparc at work, runs at 0.1 to 0.01 of normal speed.
It allows just about anything, subject to the software developer coding support
for it. Whereas VirtualBox (x86-on-x86) runs at 0.9 or 90% of normal speed (or so).
[Picture] Win7 x32 Enterprise (a Microsoft-prepped VM!) on Win11 x64 Host
VirtualBox 6.1.44
https://i.postimg.cc/Dz03wmP4/w7-x32-on-w11-x64-speed-test.gif
>>
>> As others have said, it's not an emulation of the OS, it's an emulation
>> of a complete system - on which you can install whatever OS you like,
>> including of course W7-32. You'll need a valid licence to do so - as far
>> as MS are concerned, you're running two computers - though I believe the
>> activation servers for 7 are getting fairly lax in their checking now.
>
> And then the question is: how well does that complete system interact
> with the host system?
>
> Is it possible to have the programs on the emulator and the data on
> the host system? Can one copy and paste between them?
>
Once the Guest OS has the "VirtualBox Additions" file executed, that
adds Copy/Paste integration, as well as Drag&Drop file copying. The cursor
will have a (+) symbol which indicates you are over something where
a file drop will work. If the "stop sign" is on the cursor, it means
the Drag&Drop subsystem is currently disabled for some reason.
The VirtualBox Additions also provides a graphics driver for the emulated
graphics. While there is "experimental graphics acceleration", where
the graphics card in the Host provides some help with the graphics,
you will get used to the thing not having acceleration after a while.
That's when having a faster CPU helps with the experience.
OpenGL: renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 12.0.0 128 bits) v: 4.5 Mesa 21.2.6 # unaccelerated
OpenGL: renderer: SVGA3D; build v: 2.1 Mesa 21.2.6 # VBox Additions for Linux guest
GLXGears 300 frames per second animation # unaccelerated (CPU driven by Windows)
GLXGears 400 frames epr second animation # Vbox Additions in Guest (CPU driven...)
GLXGears 9000 frames per second animation # Ubuntu with NVidia driver, native test,
# showing how fast graphics would have been with good support
>> Does what you want to do involve accessing external hardware, or just
>> old data (presumably on an external drive, CD, DVD, or memory stick)?
>
> I used to copy my main data files (the ones I was working on every
> day) between by desktop and laptop using a USB flash drive, and a
> batch file, or rather set of batch files that copied everything with
> one command -- dsk2flsh, flsh2lap, lap2flsh, flsh2dsk.
>
> One advantage of that is that our electricity supplier has periodic
> load shedding when demand exceeds supply and they would turn off the
> power to certain areas in rotation, and when that happened I could
> just transfer the files to the laptop and carry on working.
Our outages here are "one second or one week", and a computer UPS handles
the former and not the latter :-) It takes quite a bit of battery
in a UPS, to hide load-shedding at a power company. Whole house
batteries are around $10K a pop, and a configuration of two of them
is recommended by the maker. Poorly constructed whole house
power, is either in charging mode (giving no house power) or in run mode
(house power, but cannot incorporate solar PV output). Typical inverter
capability never seems to pass the 3kW to 6kW range (some have "short
term burst" and that's how they hit the 6kW operating point). You can
run small electric motors with a little luck :-) The burst mode helps spin
up the motor. Maybe it will run 6kW output for ten seconds.
Paul