[Qemu-devel] iEmulator tested in c't

[olig9]

Hallo,
german computer magazine c't (no. 7, 21.3.2005) contains a test of
iEmulator, a Qemu-based x86-emulator for Mac OS X. I think iEmulator was
already mentioned on the list.
It might be interesting to see what c't thinks is important for such an
emulator. For all those who can't access the article, here is an excerpt
from that article:

-Qemu is mentioned as the iEmulator base. It is noted that Qemu itself has
to be run and configured from a terminal.
-good: iEmulator configuration is easy (via GUI)
-not good: iEmulator has no full-screen mode
-not good: no sound, no USB, no Firewire (don't know why iEmulator has no
sound while Qemu has...)
-not good: iEmulator can't access CD-ROMs directly (strange...). CD-ROMs
must be copied to hard disk; iEmulator has to be shut down to change CDs.
-not good: disk image does not grow, but has a fixed size
-not good: mouse cursor can't change easily from guest to host (one always
has to press Ctrl+Shift).
-Win98-installation was complicated because a boot floppy was required
(don't know why - there a bootable Win98 CD-ROMs which do work with Qemu).
-iEmulator-manual describes Win98 installation.
-good: Win98 worked "quite acceptable" on a Power Mac G4 (1GHz, 512 MB RAM).
-good: internet access worked out of the box, iEmulator simply used the Mac
OS X default connection (probably user-net?)
-WinXP installs directly from CD.
-not good: WinXP installation and use was very slow.
-not good: internet/network access under WinXP didn't work.
-WinXP Device Manager shows a system speed of 33MHz :)
-not good: iEmulator didn't display an activity indicator, so one doesn't
know if iEmulator has crashed (which it did sometimes, eg. when changing
screen resolution).
-author's conclusion: iEmulator is not usable for professional work, but...
-with a fast G5 and using Win98 and software with low system requirements it
can be used...

My conclusion:
I think the author compares iEmulator implicitly with VMWare and VirtualPC,
so the quite bad result is not astounding.
But as iEmulator apparently doesn't offer some features which are already
available in Qemu 0.6.1 and CVS, some problems mentioned do not apply to
Qemu.

Anyway, maybe the article can give some hints on where Qemu could be
improved. 

Oliver Gerlich

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