[haiku-development] Re: Haiku on VirtualBox

Hi Pedro,

"Pedro Pinto" <pemdpinto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm interested on adding VirtualBox support to Haiku (without 
> virtualization
> extensions). There is a ticket (56) on VirtuaBox track saying:
> 
> "There are two or three major problems with their OS: 1) Very picky 
> timing
> loop during boot (calculate_cpu_conversion_factor() in
> haiku/src/system/boot/platform/bios_ia32/cpu.cpp) 2) ss selector 
> checks all
> over the place. As the ss rpl is one in VBox, it will take the wrong 
> code
> path. 3) Peculiar lss instructions (perhaps never executed) with 
> possible
> selectors that are not wide open. Correcting this is not trivial and 
> with
> possible bad side effects, therefor I won't fix it. This OS doesn't 
> warrant
> the necessary engineering effort required to get it running.
> So there are two possible workaround: - use VMX or AMD-V hardware
> virtualization (see manual for turning it on) - Haiku should rewrite 
> certain
> parts to be a bit more virtualization friendly"
> Has anyone worked on this before, how difficult can it be?  Any 
> advices of
> how to start?

I must admit I don't even really understand the complains, so I am 
unsure which parts of Haiku are "affected". Being virtualization 
friendly is surely a nice goal, though it didn't have a high priority 
as it works fine in VMware and Qemu :-)
1) could probably be done differently, I never really looked at it, as 
it just works on real hardware - but it's a tiny part of code, anyway. 
Dunno what 2) and 3) refer to.
If Haiku performs faster in a virtualized environment, I'd be all for 
it - if it's just to let them getting around fixing their software, I 
don't think it's worth the effort ("This virtualization software 
doesn't warrant the necessary engineering effort required to get it 
running." :-)).

Bye,
   Axel.

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