Virtual machines

[Terrence W. Zellers]

On Thu, 22 May 1997, Dwight Hughes wrote:

> | From: Terrence W. Zellers <zellert@voicenet.com>
> |  
> |    IMO it ***MUST*** be capable of fully virtualizing itself in 
> | execution, not just emulation.   This means it must have a paging
> | prefix algorithm, the ability to intercept any instructions which

> Can this be done with an i486 or Pentium? Does it require special
> hardware to pull it off properly?

    The x86 architecture is NOT self virtualizable, no, but we're
discussing an idealized VM to be emulated.  That can be done, of
course, though at greater overhead than true on virtualizable hardware.
A fair amount of the FREEVM discussion touched on that.

...
> 
> PS: would you mind if I posted your letter over to the LispOS side?
> 
 No problem.  Go for it.
                                          -- TWZ