Comments on: Solaris 11 came out today

By: atar

atar — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:40:15 +0000

Oh, yes! I can confirm it. Didn’t want to cheat on qemu, but VirtualBox totally rocks for my use case.
My test takes 27 minutes under qemu, and just 2 minutes 50 seconds under VirtualBox.

Thanks for the hint!

By: neozeed

neozeed — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 02:01:25 +0000

In reply to Michal Necasek. wow that's pretty cool then!

By: Michal Necasek

Michal Necasek — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:22:12 +0000

In reply to atar. Actually, VirtualBox always requires hardware virtualization for 64-bit guests. But the host OS does not need to be 64-bit. So yes, it's possible to run a 64-bit guest on top of (32-bit) XP.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:13:08 +0000

In reply to atar.

I’m pretty sure to run ‘long mode’ with HW acceleration you’ll need a long mode OS…. VirtualBox does offer hardware accel, it is a more ‘refined’ version of Qemu that has been C++ified….

Their USB & Network drivers leave a *LOT* to be desired however…

By: atar

atar — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:48:55 +0000

In reply to neozeed. Is VirtualBox faster by itself or does it offer a hw virtualization for x86_64? I have a use case for running a x86_64 guest on a Windows XP host (cpu is a x86_64 but runs in 32 bit mode), and wondering what can be the fastest solution. I guess no virtual machine can use a hw virtualiazation in this case, right?

By: neozeed

neozeed — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 03:03:57 +0000

In reply to Michal Necasek.

well that’d certainly explain what on earth it is doing… You’d think they’d take a page from the old nextstep/openstep/osx and do the progress bar of nonsense… but I guess it would be too much traffic for a 300baud console or something.

By: Michal Necasek

Michal Necasek — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:13:42 +0000

Oh, and BTW… the first boot of Solaris after installation takes much longer than usual, because Solaris is setting up 100+ services. This is cleverly hidden by the graphical boot screen, and the user is left to think that booting is just ultra slow. You can hit Esc to show a text console and see what’s going on.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:32:25 +0000

In reply to Ottavio.

0.10 …? I just know that kqemu went out as it only worked with GCC 3, and 32bit versions of Windows… While I trust GCC 3 more than 4 there is just a lot of platforms that only have GCC 4…. But anyways when Qemu transitioned from GCC 3 to GCC 4 compatible it pretty much left kqemu behind…

By: Ottavio

Ottavio — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:00:16 +0000

Neozeed, have you a got any version of Qemu on your site that works well with Kqemu on x86 linux guest and win xp sp3 host? Thanks

By: neozeed

neozeed — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:52:45 +0000

In reply to dgunix.

Oracle charges more the bigger you are… I think we paid over 500k for our install… their ‘support’ is anything but.

I really did like Solaris 10 but as things changed, esp how you couldn’t use it on non sun HW for x86… What sucks is that I’ve lost my sol 10, C & fortran disks. damn.

Oh well there is always gcc.