[HN Gopher] A quick look at OS/2's builtin virtualization
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A quick look at OS/2's builtin virtualization
Author : zdw
Score : 57 points
Date : 2024-12-14 05:06 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.uninformativ.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.uninformativ.de)
| daitangio wrote:
| Os/2 Warp had support for windows 3.x virtualization, so little
| surpise for me. Also IBM developed virtualizaion tenchnology
| (like LPAR) long time ago:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_partition
| sedatk wrote:
| Yes, one of its marketing highlights were "a single Windows app
| won't crash the whole OS" as that was before Windows 95 came
| out. IIRC, some Windows apps even ran faster under OS/2.
| zabzonk wrote:
| If IBM had given OS/2 to their mainframe division to develop (and
| hired someone to design a better GUI, with much better icons -
| these things matter), I think it could have been a hit. I was
| using hypervisor stuff on VM/CMS in the early 1980s and it worked
| flawlessly (fun to run a vm inside a vm at the time). Of course,
| you need the hardware to support it, and IBM were too slow on
| using the latest Intel chips, and should probably have developed
| their own.
| smm11 wrote:
| The OS/2 Warp commercials blew my mind in the mid-90s, and they
| never even once showed the system. I was a Mac person at the
| time, and would have been all over OS/2 if I'd had the chance.
| But I was in a very small town, this was the world with a pre-
| functional-WWW, and it was just impossible to find anything but
| System 7 and Win 3.1 at the time.
|
| Then I saw a NeXT slab and it was all over.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZRy-6E1FDQ
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > Windows 3 also uses virtualization for its DOS boxes, but this
| is "internal" to Windows. OS/2, on the other hand, exposes this
| entire functionality to the user.
|
| What does this mean? It looks wrong. Of course Windows exposes
| virtualization to users, otherwise they would not be able to run
| anything on DOS boxes. That's the entire point, and that's why
| virtualization is used. Because the difference between a "DOS
| program" and "real mode operating system" is, due to how such a
| thin layer DOS is, practically zero. So each DOS box is a full VM
| emulating everything from VGA to floppy, because your average DOS
| program is very likely going to access them directly.
|
| The same test program happily runs in a Win95 DOS box.. or even a
| Windows 10 one. This is not a special OS/2 feature, it's a
| requirement for running a DOS box.
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