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Re: What support for Plug-and-Play does your virtual machine have?

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> This is VirtualBox 2.0.4 btw but I don't think it changes - still 
> works on 4.0.0 which is the latest that I've tried (USB is another 
> matter which is why I'm still on 2.0.4).
>

Versions are important.  (-:

I've tracked down the source for the ROM image that VirtualBox uses.  It 
doesn't have, as I surmised, Plug-and-Play support.  Interestingly, 
there's a common ancestry here with the ROM image used by Bochs, from an 
earlier version of which the VirtualBox source was taken, and which 
(since then) gained skeleton Plug-and-Play support somewhere in between 
version 2.4 and version 2.4.5.  VirtualBox hasn't kept track with the 
Bochs improvements, it seems.

What Bochs has isn't enough for real world use, however, so even if 
VirtualBox caught up with Bochs it wouldn't be enough.  It only 
implements the version check.  All other functions fail with an error.  
This is pretty useless.  So I suppose that we're lucky that no-one with 
Bochs 2.4.5 spoke up.  (-:

This is exceedingly annoying, because these virtual machines don't 
operate like real machines in this regard.  (Real machines have had 
fully implemented Plug-and-Play firmware support as standard since the 
late 1990s.)  But its one more datum supporting the point that I've long 
made that x86 virtual machines don't set out to exactly duplicate real 
hardware.

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Re: What support for Plug-and-Play does your virtual machine have? Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-02-01 22:51 +0000

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