[vbox-dev] VirtualBox 4.1.x and Windows 8 status update

[François Revol]

Le 14/09/2011 09:59, Alexey Eromenko a écrit :
> Hi All !
> 
> As you might know, Windows 8 developer preview is now officially
> released, so anyone can freely download the build and try it out:
> http://windows8beta.com/2011/09/download-now-windows-8-developer-preview
> No registration required.

Oh I might have a look just to see what they stole this time to other
OSes :)

> The good news: VBox 4.1 works on it as host. (you can start VMs)
> And Win8 works as guest: installed successfully -- audio, network and
> mouse (via VBox USB tablet) works fine.
> The bad news: GuestAdditions fail to install (unable to detect OS version).

Well, I recall some motherboard driver installs failing on Vista with
either:
"This software requires Windows XP or later"
or even:
"The install program has detected that the current operating system is
not Windows"
So I suppose it's some joke alike :)
Maybe the guest drivers refuse to run on an unknown version ?

> Desktop looks like Windows 7.

Which looks like the KDE 1.x (for the dock at least) :P

> Other than that my personal feeling is a bit strange -- very difficult
> for me to use the new "Metro" style Start Menu,
> and so far I have found no way to revert to classic Windows Start Menu.
> 
> The good news about Win8 is that it has built-in virtualization:
> (according to some articles, not tried yet)
> 1. loop-mount of ISOs and VHDs

Cool, Linux just knows loop-mount for 10 years, BeOS for 15
(not with VHD though, but Haiku should handle this quite soon) :P

> 2. Hyper-V and enlighted PV drivers
> This means you can mount virtual HDD on host, even when VM is powered
> off ! (it could be useful for VBox users)

Better when it's off than on actually, most filesystems are not designed
to be used by 2 OS at once :p

> NOTE: Vmware WS includes loop-mounter for VMDK for both Windows and
> Linux hosts, while there are 3rd party tools to loop mount VDI on
> Linux hosts only. There are no freeware nor OSS tools exist (that I
> know of) to loop-mount vHDDs on Windows hosts.

Well, you might try to ask the ReactOS folks, they have some experience
in writing block drivers and filesystems for win32, if you want this for
older versions...

> ARM support: makes me wonder: why ?

Tablets !
Microsoft doesn't want other OSes to stay on those.

> It offers no advantages for desktops and one huge disadvantage: legacy
> apps will stop working, so I will stick to x86 arch in the coming
> decade. (on desktop)
> Unlike Apple with their Rosetta emulator, Win8-ARM cannot emulate x86.
> (x86 MAC OS X does emulate PowerPC for backward compatibility)

Well, someone with enough motivation could add win32 userland support to
QEMU, which would allow translating the syscalls from the VM to the host
directly, as can be done for linux.

François.