Hi Jakob,
Quote:
> Yes, it is stupid. Microsoft does not (officially at least) make any
> money from the sale of hardware upgrades (although they often use the
> sale of a new PC as an opportunity to sell another copy of Windows at
> the discounted OEM price).
>
> Technically, the deepest core function in any VPC product is the
> "hypervisor" which is responsible for making the Virtual machine think
> it owns its own CPU, even though it really doesn't. This hypervisor
> needs to be implemented differently (and in a more difficult way) on a
> CPU without enabled hardware VT, than when much of the work can be done
> by the VT feature of the CPU.
>
> So if Microsoft was starting from scratch with no older VPC product to
> upgrade, implementing VPC to run only with hardware VT would be the
> easiest/cheapest solution. But Microsoft is not starting from scratch,
> they have a functioning hypervisor for non-VT machines, which they could
> continue to maintain, with higher level code in VPC automatically
> loading either the VT or the non-VT hypervisor depending on machine
> capabilities.
Well you certainly have allot of knowledge on the subject, and
understand what's going on under the hood. So it seems that technically
Microsoft are doing this abandon legacy code? Rather than just optimising it
and bringing it up to new standards, same old same old.
This is a big shame and I don't see how big companies will be able to
adobt this technology without performing the upgrade. And durning a
worldwide recession this is extremely blinkered of Microsoft.
Quote:
> Note that large amounts of "auxiliary" code such as .vhd support, device
> simulation, virtual BIOS, user interface, VPC additions etc. etc. could
> be shared by the two hypervisor implementations, keeping the total cost
> down and allowing VPC images to be shared amongst different physical
> machines. It would also allow VPCs with saved state to survive a change
> in the VT BIOS setting on the Host PC.
Well I just hope one of the devs/pms might take these points on board
and reconsider their architechture. Not meaning they abandon what they have
done, just bring the legacy stuff back even stronger than it was before,
knowing Microsoft I very much doubt the code was immaculate as it was.
*fingers crossed*
Nick.