Shh, I'm supposed to be working, don't tell my boss ;)
I wrote in a previous entry about the VirtualBox SDK, and the potential for using that SDK to add 3d graphics support. I was pretty excited. All I needed to do was create a DLL that could be loaded into the VirtualBox I used for running Linux on my Windows laptop. Well, I tried a simple example, but could never get the DLL to load. Looking at the source code for VirtualBox, I noticed that there's a "hardened" mode for building it. For security, it prevents rogue DLLs from getting loaded. I guess my DLL looked pretty rogue :(. And the complexity of building VirtualBox myself scared me off.
I've also been a pretty big fan of the Qemu emulator, especially for emulating mobile devices. But you can use it for emulating a PC and there is an accelerator driver that apparently makes it fast. So I guess I could give that a try. I've mucked around in the qemu source in the past and I have an idea on how to add a device. It's not as clean as the VirtualBox SDK promised, but it could be done.
Along the way, I found Qemu Manager, a nice GUI that manages virtual machines and launching them on Windows. Very cool. And it's extensible so that if a new version, or a cleverly hacked version, of qemu comes out, you can have it manage launches for them as well.
So this weeks "Open Source Tools Kudos" go to David Reynolds for building the Qemu Manager. Very cool and thanks!
Funny you should mention VirtualBox and 3d graphics. I was just barely showing my Intro to CS class different operating systems and ran Ubuntu in a VM. I was really hoping that I could use Compiz in the VM but found that was not possible... this SDK sounds exciting.
ReplyDeleteAs far as building VirtualBox, the instructions don't look too bad, just steppy. If I get free time it would be nice to make a scons script (www.scons.org) to build it. The nice thing is that it can spit out a Visual Studio project file for those who want to use an IDE.