Support for Linux KVM

[jschwart]

As you may know, Linux exposes the KVM API which allows applications to use virtualization features, This is currently used by QEMU and DOSEMU2. There is also a proposal to use this in DOSBox: https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbo ... river).txt

An article on using the KVM API is here: https://lwn.net/Articles/658511/

Has it been considered to add KVM support to PCem?

[leilei]

PCem isn't a virtual machine and KVM won't do any benefit regarding emulating old computers faithfully - especially considering the CPUs that support virtualization can't do 3DNow.

Also note that github you linked to is not part of the DOSBox project but a rather distant fork that has big ambitions (to run Windows 9X) and compromises (no dynarec). DOSBox's goals are running DOS games by emulating as highlevel as possible to behave like running a DOS game in Windows 95's "dos box" on other operating systems and CPU architectures, and the dynarec satisfies enough performance demand for the later DOS games so there's not much need for a virtualizer there either. All that would do is introduce more variables of segfaults doing unexpected behavior on ludicrous CPU speeds among other drastic core changes...

[jschwart]

Thanks for the response. I was not aware that development of PCEM was focused only on this direction. Possibly it would be something for a fork of PCEM as well unless it could be done in a non-invasive way at some point.