QEMU Making Progress With Legacy-Free Display Support - Avoids Old VGA Code

[kpedersen]

In actuality, the biggest users of QEMU are cloud providers. Wipro, RedHat, Microsoft, HP, Amazon and tons of individual VPS companies.

That is very true and I am noticing Qemu focusing very much on Linux above all else. It was semi recently that DOS with a virtual memory manager like desqview was not handling keys correctly due to missed interrupts.

Cloud providers are mostly using it as a frontend to their virtualiser. Or perhaps in dire circumstances a backend to their nested virtualisation fallback.

But at the same time it is also one of the best we have for emulation. For example the Android (ARM) emulator. I find we actually have very view choices when it comes to decent emulation support for older systems. I.e I am amazed that in 2018 there is no emulator capable of running IRIX.

[rmoog]

That is very true and I am noticing Qemu focusing very much on Linux above all else. It was semi recently that DOS with a virtual memory manager like desqview was not handling keys correctly due to missed interrupts.

Cloud providers are mostly using it as a frontend to their virtualiser. Or perhaps in dire circumstances a backend to their nested virtualisation fallback.

But at the same time it is also one of the best we have for emulation. For example the Android (ARM) emulator. I find we actually have very view choices when it comes to decent emulation support for older systems. I.e I am amazed that in 2018 there is no emulator capable of running IRIX.

I'll tell you more. QEMU has actually very limited support for non-x86 hardware. Just try running FreeBSD on SPARC or PowerPC inside of QEMU. Make my day

[kpedersen]

I'll tell you more. QEMU has actually very limited support for non-x86 hardware. Just try running FreeBSD on SPARC or PowerPC inside of QEMU. Make my day

My general findings with using Qemu (static) on FreeBSD:

i386 - perfect (90%+)
x86_64 - perfect (90%+)
armv6 - pretty good (80%+)
aarch64 - perfect (90%+)
sparc - nope (0%)
sparc64 - nope (10%)
PowerPC - nope (0%)

Luckily my main interest in Qemu is its digital preservation capabilities and unless they screw it up, it still provides a pretty acceptable experience for DOS, Pre-NT WIndows.