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Using VMWARE for testing

Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 4:13 pm
by TheFakeJon
Hello, I am currently doing some OS development and I was wondering how I could go about using VMWARE to test my OS? I know that Bochs has a built-in Debugger, is there a way for me to debug my OS using VMWARE

thanks

Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2006 7:48 pm
by TheQuux
IIRC, vmware has some kind f debugging trace feature, but I couldn't make any sense of the log files it produced.

VMware is designed in such a way that bochs-style (or even qemu-style) debugging would be extremely difficult to implement.

In my case, I used Bochs for the really low-level stuff, and for when things were (and still are) triple faulting, qemu for functionality tests and for when I wanted to debug the logic; QEMU lets you use gdb for debugging.

I also use VMware as a reference platform... if my code doesn't work there, it probably won't work anywhere else. (but see the heisenberg bug that I posted earlier today :- )

In your case, depending on how far along you are, I'd suggest either Qemu or Bochs. Of course, if you mantaining a production kernel, then VMware may be a better choice.

Hope that helped a little...
--tq

Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2006 11:29 pm
by chase