Cool video on virtualization | The Coffeehouse

longzheng

DigitalDud wrote:

longzheng wrote:What do you mean? It's clearly going to impact or at least influence what Windows 7's kernel will look like.

I agree with you if you say MinWin is not going to replace the Windows kernel in 7 at least, but they're not going to spend all this effort and not improve the production kernel they'll ship.

Right but Traut said over and over in the video there are no productization plans for MinWin, meaning its probably not going to end up in Windows 7. It seems like its more of an internal experiment, how small can NT be stripped down and still boot. In no way could this be used for any practical purposes.

Okay you and I interpreted that a bit differently then.

My interpretation of "not productizing" it is that they won't offer or sell a slimmed down Windows kernel by itself, for example what they're doing with Server 08 and Server Core. They won't do that for MinWin, but will still use it in Win7.

But I guess you could also interpret it as "only a research project".

RichardRudek
So what do you expect for nothin'... :P

Yeah !

But I'm a little concerned about the avoidance when asked about Virtualising the Graphics card(s) - at ~54mins. Specifically the avoidance of "partitioning". That is, being able to specify which card(s) are to be used (solely) by specific VMs.

Partitioning should be much easier than "Multiplexing", and in my case, would solve a lot of problems... I wonder wether I could get a job there... Wink

PS: You don't necessarily need to have an "SLI" motherboard in order to have multiple graphics cards.

PPS: I like Larry's stab at Eric (on Long's blog). Anybody have a free copy of Windows 1.0 that I can have - I have an old XT clone system that I haven't fired up for while... Cool

TimP

RichardRudek wrote:
Yeah !

But I'm a little concerned about the avoidance when asked about Virtualising the Graphics card(s) - at ~54mins. Specifically the avoidance of "partitioning". That is, being able to specify which card(s) are to be used (solely) by specific VMs.

I wouldn't expect Viridian/Windows Server Virtualization to really go after adding high end 3D acceleration support since most servers don't even have graphics cards. It's been a while since I used Virtual Server 2005, but if I recall, it doesn't even emulate a sound card. As far as I can tell, he's not speaking from the Virtual PC point of view.

That said, I'm really hoping video card emulation/virtualization picks up in subsequent releases of Virtual PC and VMware Workstation. I've heard some interesting ideas involving adding VM logic into the graphics card to ease partitioning of the hardware as well as using the GPU to emulate multiple video cards through software.

I have a box (make that boxes) full of Windows 95/98 games that won't run on VMware's (or VPC's) lame SVGA adapter and I wouldn't trust installing them on Vista because they're so old now. The games from the late 1990s are yearning to be played!

stevo_
Human after all

Personally I thought min-win was just a testing configuration for the core kernel, something that was just for them only at this stage of the OS's development time..

I also don't see what a hypervisor has to do with Windows 7, servers sure; but why would I need OS virtualization on a client desktop? and why is this talked about in context with Windows, when the hypervisor is completely independant..

As far as what was shown in the video, it was talking about their hypervisor, then showing virtual PCs, one being this 'min-win' of the current Windows kernel (suposedly).

This was a semi interesting video, but nothing to do with Windows 7 as far as I can see.

RichardRudek
So what do you expect for nothin'... :P

TimP wrote:

RichardRudek wrote:Yeah !

But I'm a little concerned about the avoidance when asked about Virtualising the Graphics card(s) - at ~54mins. Specifically the avoidance of "partitioning". That is, being able to specify which card(s) are to be used (solely) by specific VMs.

I wouldn't expect Viridian/Windows Server Virtualization to really go after adding high end 3D acceleration support since most servers don't even have graphics cards. It's been a while since I used Virtual Server 2005, but if I recall, it doesn't even emulate a sound card. As far as I can tell, he's not speaking from the Virtual PC point of view.

Just in case this isn't clear, by "partitioning" I mean being able to configure what actual hardware devices are presented (enumerable) by a single VM. That is, the "hypervisor" virtualises the hardware enumeration processes, but it does not actually involve itself with the device in any way beyond that.

Theoretically, this will also then allow the Hypervisor to control the "allocation" of any device, not just a "graphics card" because only one VM (at any one particular time) is allowed to see and control the actual device.

Well, there perhaps needs to be additional checks to ensure that only the "owning" VM "talks" with the particular piece of hardware, but other than that, the operation of the device is wholly under the control of the particular VM.

Having said that, there will likely still be issues where the VM doesn't have the appropriate drivers, and through improper operation, effects the stability of the underlying HOST system. ie Your old games/OS not being able to drive the actual Graphics card properly (the old OS doesn't have the required drivers), killing the HOST - a violation of the partitioning. Not good.

n4cer

stevo_ wrote:
Personally I thought min-win was just a testing configuration for the core kernel, something that was just for them only at this stage of the OS's development time..

I also don't see what a hypervisor has to do with Windows 7, servers sure; but why would I need OS virtualization on a client desktop? and why is this talked about in context with Windows, when the hypervisor is completely independant..

As far as what was shown in the video, it was talking about their hypervisor, then showing virtual PCs, one being this 'min-win' of the current Windows kernel (suposedly).

This was a semi interesting video, but nothing to do with Windows 7 as far as I can see.

The MinWin Eric demos is from the Seven source tree. He also mentions that Seven will support 256 CPUs and possibly rely more on virtualization for backward compatibility (especially as they move to a new kernel).

MinWin itself isn't new to Seven. It's a language/SKU-neutral base that is also used in deployment scenarios for Vista/Server 2008. Overall, it's not much info about Seven, but it is a nice start given the OS is still years away from release.

VPC was used most likely because of convenience. He'd have had to install Server 2008 on his laptop (or RDP to Redmond) to demo their hypervisor and what the audience would see on screen would be largely the same as VPC. The need for a hypervisor on the desktop is subjective like most things, though beyond backward compatibility, software development/testing, etc., one thing you'll probably see them used for is management and security partitions that monitor/manipulate the user OS without being vulnerable to exploits affecting that OS. There's video from (last year's ?) Fall IDF demonstrating this concept.

cornelius

slashdot picked up on the story

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/18/236233

Ray6

cornelius wrote:
slashdot picked up on the story

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/18/236233

Yes, this is really getting out of hand.

Mary Jo Foley is reporting on it, and APC Magazine has managed to come up with this headline from the same video!

GoddersUK
I CAN has cheezburger and you CAN'T has stop me!

Ray6 wrote:

APC Magazine has managed to come up with this headline from the same video!

Presumably they'd compain if all the extras that make it "bloated" were removed.

esoteric
λ

PaoloM wrote:

creditcard wrote: Is there an overview or something of the planned features for Windows 7?

Not yet. We're working on that.

Looking forward to it! Smiley

TimP wrote:

intelman wrote: I need my fast boot times.

I'm not sure I see the fascination with boot speed. I turn my computer on when I wake up and turn it off when I go to bed. It's on for about 16 hours a day and it spends maybe 2-3 minutes tops booting. I'd rather see them work on enhancing performance around the parts that I spend the majority of the time using.

I don't get that either. Who cares if it boots fast if it snails on post-boot. Often times you may not even be turning off the PC, or you'll be hibernating perhaps. In those cases reboot is extremely fast.

Tom Servo
W-hat?

Re: Virtualization and graphics cards

That's how I see things:

With Vista and ongoing, Windows supports disconnecting the graphics stack from the graphics hardware. At least this feature is needed for runtime graphics card resetting, e.g. on error or live driver updates. Direct3D support apparently only works if the games/applications trap the responsible (dis)connection events and react accordingly. That might needed to be changed to allow legacy apps to work with disconnection.

Any system that uses an X11 server can be hammered into that way rather easily, since it's a direct client/server model.

MacOSX, who the hell knows...

Given these things, a hypervisor could ask a domain to release the control of the graphics hardware and hand it over to another domain. Given the orchestration support in the operating system, and if people could settle on a goddamn standard, this should be rather easy to implement. This may restrict VMs to run fullscreen only, but that's a drawback you have to accept.

It may be possible to use DirectX 10.1 GPU scheduling and virtual memory, given support from the other domains, to remap graphics operations from the guest domains into the host one. But since currently nothing can deal with virtualized GPUs, this is pointless. Not Windows, not X11, not MacOSX.

Matthias

Charles wrote:

Ion Todirel wrote: cool video, if Channel9 videos where that technic...

We don't film presentations. Further, we don't make the assumption that our audience is composed primarily of CS graduate students. That said, we do provide some rather technical content from time to time...

Balance is important when the information is targeted at a general technical audience as opposed to a specific subset of domain experts...

Now, if you are asking for more techical content that approaches advanced academic levels, then, yes, we can, do and will provide this as well as our conversational meet-the-people-behind-the-scenes style.
C

Charles, I think I speak for a good portion of people in saying that this video was rather interesting and that I found it to be more relevant to me. Now with that said, the majority of videos here are not specific to my job but help me out a ton!

I'm an IT guy and this site focuses on developers. I am well aware of that. But I know that there is a growing number of IT guys who visit this site (and I actually encourage them to!) to not only get an inside look at the technology coming down the pipe, but also learn how/why it is built and their specific purposes. This creates a better understanding of the technology which helps us better implement it. I believe if you create content bridging this gap between devs and IT, you will be connecting a lot more people.

In either case, more videos like this I would love to see, but you and the team are doing a great job anyways. Keep it up bro! Cool

Michael

TimP

Dhamaal wrote:
Okay... So its finally getting "simpler" and hopefully easier. But miniWin takes up 40m RAM. Isnt that quite a lot if it doesnt even have a GUI since even Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 with a GUI would be able to run in 32mb and 64 mb respectively. And they really need to reconsider the naming convention of svchost. Too many of those run in Vista and I cannot tell which one corresponds to which service.

He's running at least a basic TCP/IP stack and web server in that 40MB, I think he said he had 7-10MB free, too. Plus the NT kernel is a lot more robust than Windows 3.1/95 and they can't be compared on equal terms. DOS could run in 640KB, but that doesn't really mean it's more efficient than NT when you compare feature sets.