I've been trying to get OS42 running with KVM, and having a heck of a time doing it. The rub appears to be disk drivers that support everything OS uses. I'm still working at it, and I might find something that works. Maybe someone else here is doing it and can tell me what they did!
Also, I know we're all still generally using the VMWare drivers for virtualization, but they were written a while ago now, and the virtualization environment has changed a bit. QEMU-- which is the backend for KVM, the non-PV Xen stuff, and VirtualBox to a lesser extent-- has "virtio" drivers for network and disk io, plus a "QXL" video driver for better 2d graphics performance.
I've thought about porting the linux drivers for these as they did for the VMWare stuff, but it'll be a while before I could really sink my teeth into it, and I've not really written drivers for OS before. Anybody else had this idea or is working on it?
I think a really good thing here is that it would essentially tie hardware requirements to whatever Linux can run on. Even for a dedicated OS system, it'd be pretty straightforward to write a small Linux wrapper around a nextstep/openstep installation.
Nothing like Previous though, which I just started playing with last month and is amazing.
Maybe I don't understand how it works, but I have kept my virtual hardware at a very old revision in order to continue to use the VMware/OS drivers.
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Maybe I don't understand how it works, but I have kept my virtual hardware at a very old revision in order to continue to use the VMware/OS drivers.
Nah, you understand it. There's newer stuff, and there are standardized ways to paravirtualize IO.