Re: How easy is it to convert to VMDK format?

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

> Look at qemu-img, it does almost all that sort of thing. I thinkVB has
> its own utilities for doing such things too but coming from a
> Linux/Xen backgrouond for virtualisation, I just used what I already
> knew. I am pretty sure that my OS/2 disks are all 'raw' format which
> sounds pretty much what you are describing so it might just work
> without any conversion.
>

I find it amusing that I'm using VMDISK to create disc image files for
not quite the virtual machine that it was originally used for.

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

> Adapter: VGA
> [...]
> Don't know if it is useful or not.
>
It would have been more useful if you'd cross-posted it properly. Then
I would have seen it before now. (-: The information that M. Hemsley
has passed along about frame buffer sizes has superseded some of that,
but yes, that's the sort of resource requirement and ID information that
I was looking for. The VGA information is useful, although will
probably turn out to be the standard VGA register bank requirements. (I
haven't cross-checked yet.)

It turns out that I was asking one question ahead of where I should have
been asking. Before the display adapter information comes a more basic
question:

Does your virtual machine support the Plug-and-Play firmware
specification?

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

> This is VirtualBox 2.0.4 btw but I don't think it changes - still
> works on 4.0.0 which is the latest that I've tried (USB is another
> matter which is why I'm still on 2.0.4).
>

Versions are important. (-:

I've tracked down the source for the ROM image that VirtualBox uses. It
doesn't have, as I surmised, Plug-and-Play support. Interestingly,
there's a common ancestry here with the ROM image used by Bochs, from an
earlier version of which the VirtualBox source was taken, and which
(since then) gained skeleton Plug-and-Play support somewhere in between
version 2.4 and version 2.4.5. VirtualBox hasn't kept track with the
Bochs improvements, it seems.

What Bochs has isn't enough for real world use, however, so even if
VirtualBox caught up with Bochs it wouldn't be enough. It only
implements the version check. All other functions fail with an error.
This is pretty useless. So I suppose that we're lucky that no-one with
Bochs 2.4.5 spoke up. (-:

This is exceedingly annoying, because these virtual machines don't
operate like real machines in this regard. (Real machines have had
fully implemented Plug-and-Play firmware support as standard since the
late 1990s.) But its one more datum supporting the point that I've long
made that x86 virtual machines don't set out to exactly duplicate real
hardware.

[Peter Flass]

Why would you need P-n-P? It's virtual after all, and you can't attach
a virtual display on the fly while the VM is running.

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

> Why would you need P-n-P? It's virtual after all, and you can't
> attach a virtual display on the fly while the VM is running.
>

One needs it to determine how the virtual machine has been configured,
of course. The fact that one cannot dynamically reconfigure after boot
time is a red herring. One can still modify the virtual machine's
configuration. And even if one could not modify it, it would still have
a (fake) hardware configuration that would need to be obtained in some
way. Indeed, real machines are in the latter category. One cannot
dynamically reconfigure the (so-called) system devices of real machines
after power-on. (Indeed, one cannot reconfigure several of them with
the power off, they being integral to the motherboard.) But they're
there. They exist and their existence and configuration has to be obtained.

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

> To all of the people who run their operating systems in virtual
> machines rather than on real hardware:
>
> What display adapter hardware does your virtual machine appear to have?
>

Following up on the above: I now know about emulated display adapters
on Bochs and VirtualBox, including a whole load of bugs and differences
from real hardware. (M. Hemsley has kindly been volunteering his
VirtualBox as a testbed. I've in parallel been experimenting with
Bochs.) Anyone with any other virtual machines is welcome to add to
those two.

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

> Virtual PC (the version ported by Innotek) IIRC emulated a broken S3
> video card. Ubuntu wasn't happy with it until I found some directions
> on the net for a fix.
>

A patch to Ubuntu to run it within the virtual machine, right?

I hesitate in calling these things fixes. It's hardly a fix to work
around a broken emulator that doesn't work like real hardware does.

> I can't remember much more and right now the partition that has VPC
> installed on only exists on a backup.
>

I read that as implying that you don't use Virtual PC any more. If
that's the case, then it's not really important what display adapter it
emulates.

Then, so ... what's the display adapter on a real machine that you
have? (-:

[Allan]

Qemu seems to emulate Cirrus Logic 5446 1013:00b8
at least in an old 0.9 version here.

--
Allan.

It is better to close your mouth, and look like a fool,
than to open it, and remove all doubt.

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

>> Following up on the above: I now know about emulated display adapters
>> on Bochs and VirtualBox, including a whole load of bugs and
>> differences from real hardware. (M. Hemsley has kindly been
>> volunteering his VirtualBox as a testbed. I've in parallel been
>> experimenting with Bochs.) Anyone with any other virtual machines is
>> welcome to add to those two.
>>
> Qemu seems to emulate Cirrus Logic 5446 1013:00b8
> at least in an old 0.9 version here.
>

Thank you. That groups it with Bochs. (It's a pretty flawed emulation
if it's anything like the Bochs one.)