Re: first contact
On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 02:42:00PM +0100, Emile van Bergen wrote:
> As far as I can see, GNU has never made a point of making it hard to
> interoperate badly with non-free software. On the contrary, it makes
> every effort to adhere to standards, even if that means better
> interoperability with non-free software. That's sane policy, IMHO.
The only "standard" that is applicable here is that of the IA32
architecture and the peripherial devices, not all of those latter are well
standardized. As the Hurd certainly runs on an IA32 machine (it runs on
mine!), any problem of running it inside VMWare is a bug in VMWare. About
the device drivers, that is a more difficult issue and would have to be
looked at on a case-by-case basis. We certainly would never keep bugs
around just to make it harder to run it inside VMWare! This is because we
never intentionally keep bugs around if we know and have the fix, regardless
on what is affected[1].
Anyway, various people tried running the Hurd inside VMWare with varying
degree of success and failure (some say it works, but another experienced
person saw problems when putting real workload on it, so you will just have
to try yourself). I don't think VMWare supports the Hurd (there isn't even
the question being asked if the Hurd supports VMWare, which has a completely
different meaning from the thing we are talking about), but it might work
for you. However, if you have a problem, you can not come to us and say
"this doesn't work on VMWare" and expect us to do something about it. If
you found a bug, you will have to fill in the technical details on what the
bug is, so we can understand and fix it without getting a proprietary copy
of VMWare and reverse engineering its idiosyncrasis.
I hope this makes it clear what the issues are.
Thanks,
Marcus
[1] Of course we sometimes do keep bugs around, but for much better reasons,
like, being lazy ;)
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/
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