Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Following on from an entry about VMware Player in my other blog - a free virtual machine player from the folk at VMware - here's an interesting application: VMware's own Browser Appliance.

The idea's simple: it's a cut down OS just for web browsing that runs in VMware player to protect the rest of your PC from malware. If you hit problems, just reinstall the image - you won't need to rebuild a PC from scratch. It's not small - the image comes in at 206MB or so, so think of it as a proof of concept.

But still, it's a pointer to part of the future of computing: compartmentalised, functional components that run in isolation, managed by a single virtual machine manager.

Interesting JVM news from today's keynote at BEA World.

BEA are working on a JVM for processors with hardware virtualisation that will work directly with a hypervisor like Xen, removing the need for a full-blown OS under your app servers. It's some time away, but could be extremely interesting. Tying garbage collection into process migration will be very interesting and make moving VMs between compute resources a lot quicker...

If I was an OS vendor I'd be starting to look at what value the OS adds to the application platform, and getting a little worried.

(In pure speculation, I wonder if this approach could also see the return of Oracle's "Raw Iron")

...about a hacked OS X 86 than runs in a VMware image?

They're true. It's bloody slow though - even on a 3GHz hyper-threading box.

I decided to put on my journalist's hat and track the image down. It's not difficult to find - it's well seeded and carried on many BitTorrent trackers. The 2GB image takes a while to download, and then requires considerable unpacking. Once unpacked, you can open the image and start running. Some of the VMware device locations in the image need to be changed, and there's no networking, but it boots. And runs.

Well, "runs" is a bit of a misnomer, I think I prefer "crawls".

The lack of speed (the hype from the Wired article is best ignored) isn't surprising, VMware and Virtual PC need to know quite a bit about the OS they're running in order to optimise the virtual machine for the client OS, and this is only a hack of something that's actually intended for a specific hardware platform.

The hack has removed the current link to the developer motherboard TPM chip, which Rosetta needs to run. As Apple intends to preserve its hardware margins, we can expect that the final OS X for x86 will use TPM for a lot more than the current developer release - so the hacks used here are unlikely to work for anything else.

It's still rather odd seeing Aqua starting up on my PC.