What are the pro & cons for VMWare and Virtual PC?

[Guest]

What are the pro & cons for VMWare and Virtual PC?

[Moose]

Pros...
Allows you to run a virtual machine on your pc so you don't have to reset your machine or have an entire development pc for your OS.
Bochs emulator has a fairly handy debugger.

Cons...
Emulators don't always emulate the machine as they should. People on this msg'board have reported problems with their code in an emulator but not on a real machine.

Moose.

[Guest]

I mean pros & cons between them self. Like why is VMWare better then Virtual PC, or vise versa.

[bubach]

don´t know about wmwae and virtual pc, but i don´t see any need for anything else then bochs (that i am using).
It´s free and nice..

/ Christoffer

[carbonBased]

Virtual PC is microsoft, and is just recently produced... to me, those are two strikes.  I've never used it, myself, however, so I can't say for sure.

VMWare has an excellent, proven, record.  I have used it, and I think it's an excellent product.  It could use a debugger, though... for OSDev.  If Virtual PC has a debugger, then that's a plus... but I'd question the speed and accuracy of a new product like Virtual PC.

Price is another thing... VMWare isn't cheap.  Although, for $300, the ability to run any OS inside my Linux box without worrying about partitions and other crap is pretty damn sweet.

Cheers,
Jeff

[bubach]

and i guess u _can_ find it much cheaper, if u look on the right places..

[eucar]

Truthfully, if your looking for a system to help you debug the os you're writing, I would recommend Simics (www.simics.net).  It's a simulator, not an emulator, so its behaviour should exactly mirror that of an actual computer, barring bugs of course.  For this you trade speed, as it is a bit slower than bochs.  But for debugging of your code, it is an incredibly powerful system, it's free under academic licensing, and runs on both Linux and Windows.  It can simulate a variety of platforms (AMD64, x86, Alpha, ARM, IA-64, MIPS, PowerPC, and SPARC V9).

We've found it to be quite useful.

[Guest]

What is the diff between a simulator and a emulator?
Thanx

[bubach]

on of them is fake hardware an the other one is a software that fakes the hardware..