Hello All!

Is it possible to install a VM (Virtual Machine) at the Nokia N900?

Is there a total blocker for this or is the only reason we can't the lack of something like VMWare known from the PC?

I wonder why we are forced to totally flash or try to install a secons system with dualboot at our N900 when we try something like Android or MeeGo. A Virtual Machine would be so smarter.

I hope I got some good answers. This is a serious question.

Enjoy the Weekend!

Isn't this already done with the Debian/Ubuntu image that's downloaded from somewhere that lets you use GIMP, OpenOffice and whatnot in just that, a virtual machine?

qemu is a (soprt of) VM and reportedly works fine for running programs. (I have not really ever tried to run anything myself, scratchbox ARM compiles run under qemu so I have "used" it in that sense but not in the sense that I would personally figure out how to make qemu to do something specific)

VMWare et co are *para*virtualization systems, meaning they do not do full virtualization (==emulation) but "merely" control who and when the underlying HW can be accessed (this has huge performance benefits [or more specifically: avoids the huge performance penalties of full virtualization] along with important drawbacks; like not being possible to emulate different processor architehture)

Phones tend to have a lot more of esoteric hardware and buses than PCs and doing full virtualization of all of those is far from trivial (and a very fast moving target).

Also since mobile devices tend to be heavily resource constrained running the stack of host os, virtualization layer and full client os is really going to slow things down for both the host and client (probably to the point of both being unusable)

I looked at VMWare back in the days when it first came out (this is what, 10 years ago?) and while it was attractive concept the machines I ran it on (not top of the line but not low-end either) really did not have enough spare resources to do the job nicely. Then I let it be for many years, when even laptops started to come with dual-cores as standard the picture had changed dramatically; there's plenty of spare resources both cpu (especially since a lot of programs still don't do threading properly to take advantage those cores...) and RAM. Disks are faster too (though more important factor with the access speed to the disk image file on host OS is the spare RAM being used as disk cache).


So in conclusion: It's probably possible, also it's probable that the experience is very slow... (dual-boot gives you the "real" speed [disk access for loading os and programs is of course different since you can't boot the other OS from the fast internal flash])

There is bochs, but is really, really slow, (really), don't even try to use it.

I also tried qemu on a chrooted debian, and it executed as supposed to do, but for some reason, it did not recognize the HD images I copied to the n900, so I could not use it.

I tried with qcow2 and raw images.

If anyone has had a better experience with this, please comment about it

I've tried once again with qemu, and it boots floppy image.

I just tried 1 ISO (tinycore linux, the micro one), but it gave me errors when booting.

Trying to boot a HD image does not work also here, if I boot with a floppy, fdisk for example says that cannot read disk.

Vmware back in October 2009 demo'ed Vmware running on an N800 with Windows CE and Maemo I think

The only Vmware mobile product at the moment is a virtual appliance that you run on ESX or equivalent and from there you can control your VM servers from your mobile which is not quite what they demo'ed nearly a year ago

They showed the concept of having your works phone OS and your own phone OS running simultaneoulsy

Whilst the idea is a good one, in practical terms the demo didnt fare too well, the interviewer asked if you could still use the other OS and the host said yes and went to show using solitaire but the cards didnt move when she tried, so she quickly moved on

I guess you are talking about some administration gui, or remote control.

We mean, an emulator running directly into the n900, but I think it is not posible. Also, I am afraid that performance would be terrific.

do you mean something like this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFAT9RZ5OyQ / http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNo6p...eature=related. this was never released though

try bochs its in the repos

That program is awesome!! Thanks for the videos.