by CwF » 2018-06-22 15:18
@ Tekmon_Xonic
...and anyone else interested...
To keep it on track here, DEBIAN is the foundation!
...but more XP notes:
I went around in circles multiple times on multiple machines with many configurations. I was open to qemu kvm, VB, and Wine. The end game was to be able to use my tools for OBDII, mainly tuning Duramax ECM's and Allison TCM's. This is a USB device that prefers XP and is very important! Short story is the communication with the device is only reliable with a vfio passed usb. That boiled down to KVM. The program benefits from dual monitors, that boils down to KVM. The program runs on all methods, but the usb pass only on KVM. This is the firmware for expensive stuff bouncing over usb, it needs to be perfect and not good enough.
I did build up one experiment with VB. A nested hypervisor running a live dvd of debian 8.5. This live dvd VM had 24GB of memory, I loaded VB 5.1 something, then allocated 6GB of memory for a ramdisk, another 1.0GB for memory and installed XP, then installed SC4 (just copy over files and run a registry file), and it worked. Turn off the machine and it disappears. A fantastic waste of resources in every sense, but it worked well. Months ago I dl'ed the stretch VB stuff but have not pursued it yet but that would get SC4 onto my X9 and I would officially be at 100% function, I've been lazy.
A long long story simplified, KVM and vfio hardware makes all the difference. Passing a vfio usb is simple, adding a card and passing that can be done if the motherboard doesn't have a good choice. Passing video is typically the talk of vm gaming machines, as mentioned after trying many I settled on a Quadro K600. The memory limit still exist for XP, so cards with 1GB or less work best. Quadro drivers also pass 3D acceleration to a QXL driven window on the host if your so inclined. Running 2 heads on the vm also benefits from a vfio passed network card. This allows much better networking among the host and vm's and also allows x2vnc so the mouse simply tracks over to either xp vm screen perfectly, and allows efficient cut-n-paste. I have no window open on the host for the XP Pro VM except an XTerm to turn on/off x2vnc. Note I gave up on virtio drivers, QXL video does work well for my XP Home, but virtio network and storage caused issues. The Home has a balloon driver and is on an i440FX while Pro has no balloon driver and is a Q35 machine type. Then we add a vfio passed pcie HDTV tuner, add a usb version also... Right now I'm typing here in a debian VM on screen 2 and I can mouse over to screen 3 or 4 which is XP and change the TV channel! but I'm listening to HD AM radio from a visteon module (not done yet). So imagine recording HD TV while watching a movie or another channel, while a 4 core handbrake VM is crunching away, a facebook vm is collecting fake news (isolate this crap), a trader VM is watching the market, and I'm typing here in a vm oblivious to all the activity in the background! The host has been up for weeks, yes DEBIAN rocks.
Also note that the XP's on read-only backing files cannot be corrupted or infected and can be moved to another machine. That's 1.1GB for Home and 1.7GB for Pro, nice and tidy. I've successfully rotated these vm's between the X8 and the X9, I'll post back when I migrate them to something new. Of concern is some change on the host, with VB or otherwise, that causes a vm failure that needs reinstalled. I don't really trust VB as much as KVM in this regard. Overall VB is heavier than KVM. Without vfio passed assistance VB is more powerful and you probably can pass hardware to VB as easily as KVM but with native video in the vm I feel VB no longer has any advantage. I agree that VB has vastly superior virtual video over QXL but I expect that will change as KVM's QXL video gains 3D capabilities, we'll see.
All in all, XP is still very much my daily OS for off line computing and will be for another decade or more.