All Linux Things

I used HomeBrew to install virt-manager and qemu on Fedora Silverblue. That install included I think every bit and bob that is associated with qemu. There is a couple dozen different architectures. PPC, mips, alpha m68k and so forth. And in addition to that dozens of specific machine configurations. M68k lets me pick from several old Macs, some Amigas and Ataris and it goes with all the architectures allowing you to pick very specific machines configurations.

I have been creating various virtual machine to look at different desktop environments in Linux. But this opens up a lot of new play. OS/2 Warp on a PS/2. Amiga OS 4 on an Amiga 3000, pretty exciting stuff. Of course to get there I am going to have to do some more studying. Lots of older systems required ROMs, which I will need to figure out how to get and how to put to use with qemu. But it is like finding a new toy inside you old toy.

I did one of those installs on one of my Debian machines with ALL the packages...definitely didn't need that many, as I really only need UEFI boot, and arm to emulate.

I use virt-manager and qemu for much the same reason people use Stream and games, i.e. it is just a fun and pleasant pass time. Gnome-Boxes introduced me to qemu and what it allows is creating virtual machines using OSes that would run right on the hardware that runs the virtual machine. Going to qemu and virt-manager adds the ability for the virtual machine to interact with the real hardware you have. And for a good while I did not even realize that qemu could actually be made to virtualize the hardware too.

But finding that out I realized that it would be possible for qemu to replace DosBox and UAE and Basilisk and SheepShaver, which is kind of cool. In the 1920s Cord created a front wheel drive car, which failed and went nowhere. 50 years later it became "way" to make cars. I keep thinking if I dig through these old systems I will come across some obscure methodology that in another 20 years will become the "way to make a decent OS.

I mean, kinda sounds like a fun hobby to me. Although I have been rather disappointed in the performance of qemu when emulating hardware.

I guess I think of it more as passing time than a hobby, but that is probably more semantics than anything else.

What little digging I have done into performance of qemu, it seems to depend a lot on what hardware you have and what hardware you are trying to emulate. Apparently ARM processors, with their multiple cores, small instruction sets and fast through put do the best job of emulating other hardware.

I installed Windows on the Pi 400, but from what I have been reading recently, you can run 64bit Windows using qemu on the Pi 400 faster than you can run native Windows ARM. I know that qemu running on PowerPC can emulate x86 much better that qemu on x86 can emulate PowerPC.

My interest is mainly looking at the UI and the workflow. Is the UI easy to understand, and are there any different approaches to getting stuff done and is the methodology of getting things done enhanced by the UI. My typical virtual machine will have ~15GB of storage and are setup to run with a substantial portion of my hardware resources. I am just "kicking the tires" so to speak, so I do not have them up and running for long, and generally do not look to do anything productive with the virtual machine. If I find it intriguing I might keep it around for a software update or two, but if nothing really stands out in the OS I just delete it and move to something else.

Yeah, I only own AMD64 hardware, so not many choices when emulating other hardware.