[OT] Virtualization (WAS: UNIX V7)

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Eric Smith wrote:
>> Well, there is one feature that VM has that I've not seen in many 
>> other situations.  VM can run as a guest under VM.
> I asked engineers at VMware why their products won't do this, expecting 
> that it would be due to some limitation in their virtualization 
> technology.  I was dumbfounded when they explained that they 
> deliberately prevent it in order to avoid confusing their users.  :-(
> 
> If that's the real reason, they should have a way for a sophisticated 
> user to set something in a .vmx file to enable it.

That's incredibly shortsighted of them to ignore such a powerful feature.

Traditionally, that was the way that operating systems would be 
developed and tested for compatibility with newer machines at IBM.  The 
hardware wouldn't be ready yet, so the OS people wouldn't have a machine 
to use for their development work.  It's a chicken-and-egg problem.  It 
was solved by developing a version of VM that emulates the new machine, 
and running it as a guest under VM on an *older* machine.

Peace...  Sridhar