[Qemu-devel] OBSCURE technical question for qemu devs....

[Alan Jacobs]

Hello: I am Alan Jacobs in Green Bay Wisconsin USA ( north of Chicago). I have a difficult emulation question regarding interrupt driven bidirectional parallel port communication on a Celeron 220 Intel processor with 2GB RAM ( but no hardware KVM extension I can find ), but with bios option to boot from USB. The host OS would be Ubuntu 10.10 and the guest would be Windows 2K or Win XP Home edition.

The background: I am working with a 12 year old unique marine phased array sonar. The manufacturer is out of business. Their gate array driven ultrasonic unit communicates with a Windows 2K or Win XP Home PC via IRQ7 on parallel port 0x378. The PC only provides a GUI data display like a "radar" and setup control of the ultrasonic unit ; the ultrasonic unit does the fast microsecond work. Due to the "slamming" environment of boats crashing through waves we cannot use a standard hard disk drive- the heads crash and scratch the media. We are forced to use solid state flash disks or USB flash drives for mass storage of the operating system. Bill Gates made it next to impossible to install full Windows ( not BartPE or the like ) on a USB thumb drive ( removable media bit problems in the thumb drive controller ). Further complicating things is that the manufacturer used early WinRT to to write the parallel port control......a popular way to easily develop real time parallel port instrumentation....BUT WinRT.sys calls a low level ring 0 driver called "wrtdev0.VxD". We tried Wine but it doesn't support VxD drivers. We tried Oracle Virtualbox....doesn't recognize the port either. We can't install Windows on a thumb drive...doesn't install. Soooooo.....we are hoping Qemu or some other Linux emulator MAY??? be able to grab the parport.

The Problem: Does Qemu support "wrtdev0.Vxd" interrupt  IRQ bidirectional parallel port communication for Win2K or WinXP. HELP !!!!
Much Appreciated & Cheers.

Alan Jacobs, a frustrated old engineer
Green Bay Wisconsin
address@hidden
ph: 920-654-4477

p.s. I would be HAPPY to find a qualified consultant/ programmer to retain to help us solve this dilemma