[Plex86-devel] Re: [Plex86-developers] light weight Plex86 questions

[Kevin Lawton]

--- Steve Coleman <address@hidden> wrote:
> Can anyone tell me what "user privilege" might mean in terms of running 
> selinux (http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/) or MOSIX (http://www.mosix.org/) 
> Linux derivatives under the new VM? I had been thinking of looking into 
> VMware to virtualize them for some experiments I was wanting to do but 
> if Plex86 is getting ready for prime time then perhaps I should just 
> help out where I can (not sure where, but I do love an educational 
> challenge). If the same PVI compilation macro trick will work for 
> selinux and/or mosix then I'd much rather spend my time learning and 
> growing with Plex86 as it matures.

I'm supporting Linux 2.4 and up for guests.  I've tried 2.4.20
and 2.5.59 (getting close to 2.6).  Either works fine with the
simple macro mods.  Anything based on those should be doable all
the same as a general rule.  You have to configure out useless
hardware since I bail on probing of unsupported hardware at the
moment.  Probably could use the same guest drivers I'm making.
[and soon hopefully which other people who are truly talented
at coding drivers will be making :^) ]

Logical mods to the kernel aren't really seen by plex86.  Only
access to hardware.  So, without knowing much more, I'd say
the answer is likely yet to your question for selinux.

For mosix, being clustering software, I'm not sure what it's
additional hardware requirements are, latencies and all that.  If you want
to point me at the most salient URL which describes the stuff
I need to know, I'll look at it and take a guess.

I'm quite interested in plex86 being supported by the security world,
so if the selinux following needs a little help getting it working, I'll
try to help where I have the resources to.


> Also, is the older heavyweight MV code being put out to pasture? Or is 
> this basically a planned fork in the road between two different camps? 
> Just curious if the old camp still has a critical mass growing out 
> there, or what the older VM had to offer that might be lost to the light 
> weight version other than support for other non-x86 platforms.

I don't manage the old fork, so I'll let the others make comments there.
My personal feeling is that it would be best to retire it, and
redirect to the new ones.  This new effort will is much more clean,
simple and easy to manage, and I would certainly enjoy if all the
interested parties from the old fork would join forces on this new
effort.  I added a lot of performance to bochs as well, so bochs
in conjunction with this new plex86 will be useful for binary
only OSes.

And hey, I'm even adding comments to the code.  :^)  (a fun jab
in response to some Slashdot commentary)


-Kevin

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