[vbox-dev] How to really disable HWACC & Raw modes?

[Tom Birch]

Ah, so it turns out if you just hack the VMMR0_DO_CALL_HYPERVISOR case
of the switch statement in vmmR0EntryExWorker to always do nothing and
just return VINF_SUCCESS, then you can run purely with REM. I managed
to get up to a GUI login in Ubuntu running in this environment.

cheers,
Tom

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 8:24 PM, Tom Birch <froody at gmail.com> wrote:
> BTW my host OS is Mac OS X 10.6, and the host machine is a
> Nehalem-based MacPro (i.e. has VT)
>
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 8:15 PM, Tom Birch <froody at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm trying to get VBox running with as little dependency on the kernel
>> as possible, so no hardware acceleration, no raw mode, etc. everything
>> just running in QEMU. I'm running VBoxSDL because it supports explicit
>> arguments, and it seems to work. Running
>>
>> VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxSDL  --startvm Ubuntu --nohwvirtex
>> --norawr3 --norawr0
>>
>> will load my Ubuntu VM fairly slowly (definitely slower than if I
>> don't specify --nohwvirtex), it gets up to Gnome, and the only calls
>> into R0 while it is running are VMMR0_DO_GVMM_SCHED_HALT and
>> VMMR0_DO_GVMM_SCHED_WAKE_UP (as shown by instrumenting
>> vmmR0EntryExWorker)
>>
>> The problem is that VMMR0_DO_CALL_HYPERVISOR is called exactly once,
>> right after VMMR0_DO_VMMR0_INIT. This goes through all the switcher
>> code code that I'm trying to avoid. I don't understand why it's doing
>> this, and it seems to only happen once and have everything else
>> actually done up in userland by QEMU, any ideas?
>>
>> cheers,
>> Tom
>>
>