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[kevin at mandrakesoft.com (Kevin P. Lawton)]

Mike Bilow wrote:
> 
> How far along is it?  Is anything downloadable yet?


We made a set of micro OSes, to develop/test plex86
as we code it.  You can download source code, but
it only runs those micro OSes thus far.

Our VM (virtual machine) monitor runs in parallel
with Linux, with its own set of page tables, descriptor
tables, etc.  It's pretty cool what's going on.  During
a timeslice, we actually save the CPU context for Linux
and warp over to our own monitor OS which wraps around
the guest OS (ultimately Windows etc).

As this kind of software requires the IO devices to
be emulated (can't have two OSes driving the real
hardware), for starters we are going to use the
ones that already work in bochs.  :^)  Same for
the BIOS and some other code that I wrote.

I rehashed a bunch of things, and will release new
code to the CVS tree when the dust settles.  One of
the benefits of the rehash, is that it will be fairly
simple to add a pager algorithm to plex86 and dynamically
return pages allocated for the VM back to the page-eligible
list in Linux (rather than always be locked down).  This
means better memory resource management, and the ability
to run a good number of VMs on a memory stacked server.

-Kevin
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