Microsoft Lifts XP Mode Hardware Requirement 205
An anonymous reader writes "This week, Microsoft published a patch that allows Windows XP Mode to run on PCs without hardware-assisted virtualization. Which begs the question: Why the bizarro requirement in the first place? Was it an honest attempt to deliver an 'optimal' user experience? Or simply a concession to the company's jilted lover, Intel Corporation — 'a kind of apology for royally screwing up with the whole Windows Vista “too fat to fit” debacle,' as the blog post puts it."
My best guess.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My best guess.... (Score:5, Informative)
Taking perfectly good hardware and disabling functionality and then selling it a discount isn't new. It certainly isn't new for Intel. Remember the SX series of 386s and 486s, with the FPU disabled, though still on the chip?
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Yes, I have known Intel for a long time *sigh*.
Just a minor correction... The SX series for the i386 was that the data bus was at half width (16-bit)... The SX for the i486 was indeed a disabled FPU. (Remember the Overdrives? Simply a i486 CPU that disabled the original i486SX)... Aaaah, going down the memory lane.
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Minor nitpick:
The 386SX didn't have an FPU. It was actually identical to the 80386, with a 32-bit CPU, but it was seated on a 16-bit bus to save costs. Like a Motorola 68000.
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(sigh)
I miss the Motorola 68000-series. For that matter I miss PowerPC too. Now it's nothing but Intel-derived x86.
Re:My best guess.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very common for Intel to make 6 different CPU chips that are exactly the same, but use a laser to cut a single connection on the chip to make sure it runs at a certain speed. Sure, you can overclock the CPU, but it still has one of its throttles turned down. These chips are then sold for 10-50% less, depending on which connection is cut.
It costs them exactly the same amount to design and manufacture a 2.4 GHz model as a 3.0 GHz model. In fact, it ultimately costs more to gimp these chips, because they have to pay an engineer to design this mechanism, and buy/maintain the machine that does the gimping. Although, this does mean that I can get a gimped chip for slightly less than the cost to produce it by having someone else pay for the overpriced ungimped version. Still, I think I would rather pay $200 for a 3.0 GHz model, and not have the option of a slower model, than to pay $180 for a 2.4 GHz model while enthusiasts pay $900 for the 3.0 GHz model.
Not only are you right that this has been done for a long time, but it's also become common practice.
Re:My best guess.... (Score:5, Informative)
It's quite likely that this is done due to manufacturing defects that prevent some chips from running at the maximum speed. Testing is done to find the highest stable speed, and it's altered fix that speed as the max.
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The screening process lowers the cost of all their processors because it allows Intel to salvage a saleable product that would otherwise have to be tossed out at %100 loss if marginal processors couldn't be restricted to operating conditions where their reliability is guaranteed. There is no nefarious plotting involved here. It's a natural response to the difficulty of making high-performance devices with small feature sizes.
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All chips in the same family come off the same die. Defects and such make each capable of running different maximum speeds. Yes, some are just gimped for the hell of it but they're all from the same die anyway. Which makes perfect sense, it's not always a scam, some chips just aren't capable of running at the higher speeds. It is pretty much always done this way, it's how CPU manufacturing works (one die, different speeds).
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Still, I think I would rather pay $200 for a 3.0 GHz model, and not have the option of a slower model, than to pay $180 for a 2.4 GHz model while enthusiasts pay $900 for the 3.0 GHz model.
The pricing is part of the product strategy. If Intel could sell Core i7 Extreme's for $200 and still make as much money as they do now, they would. But, the reality is that the "enthusiasts" are effectively subsidizing the lower cost that you get for your "standard" model. Otherwise, your model would be more significantly more expensive and less competitive with, say, AMD's offerings.
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Re:My best guess.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Grandpa, is that you?
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Correct. It was a way to increase the yield of usable products from a fab plant.
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The "weird" hardware requirements are probably due to the fact that they expected AMD and Intel only to produce CPUs with hardware support for virtualization enabled.
I think its more a case of "If you want to use legacy apps you need to upgrade hardware".
Microsoft gets the hardware vendors to agree to all their crazy demands by promising a bump in sales when a new version of Windows is released.
Re:My best guess.... (Score:4, Insightful)
AMD did. Intel just makes chips for whatever their customer wants. Like how all Intel Macs have VT support, but it's iffy elsewhere (if an OEM can get a discount over chips with no VT, they'll take it).
As for disabling VT support, it's probably to avoid "blue-pill" type malware from hitching a ride underneath the OS. At least, that's a reasonable explanation if you have the setting. Sonys don't (at least, they didn't use to), which was more of an OEM thing by trying to be more Apple-like in control. (After all, Apple doesn't give you any control in the matter. Except well, they see the need for VT and have it enabled).
Ironic, too, since Sony and Apple use EFI firmware from the same company (Insyde).
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Yes, I heard that lame excuse before too. With so many higher end machines being sold having it enabled (heck, my el cheapo Turion X2 bought in January 2007 has it!) malware should be using it already. I haven't heard of a "blue-pill" type infection in the wild yet. Does it exist?
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How would you detect it if you were infected?
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Re:My best guess.... (Score:5, Informative)
What about those 386 PCs that had a turbo button that would allow it to run at twice the speed (66 MHz instead of 33 MHz)? Nobody ever turned it off, so why have the button in the first place?
For older games built for 33MHz processors that utilized the clock rate for timing.
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What about those 386 PCs that had a turbo button that would allow it to run at twice the speed (66 MHz instead of 33 MHz)? Nobody ever turned it off, so why have the button in the first place?
For older games built for 33MHz processors that utilized the clock rate for timing.
Yup. I had a bunch of games like that. Used to be fun when someone else was playing, to hit the turbo button on them... Instant GAME OVER.
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The funny thing is, I never saw any software like that for 386s or even 286s speeds - and I still had a turbo on my 486 I think. I did use the turbo on my 286 that would turn it down to 8086 speeds, because I had some games that depended on that. For all the other computers it was just a meaningless "reduced speed" mode that wasn't standard in any way.
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Wing Comander needed it on my friends computer (and maybe mine I forget).
When it started it asked you if your computer was fast or slow. allowing for 4 combinations of turbo and game speed.
one worked on my computer, another on my friends, and 3 other combinations failed to work for either of us.
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I heard that was for some games, written for the 286/8088, that didn't work right at "turbo" speeds.
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You don't realize what that was for? Some programs were designed for the 33mhz processor and were timed for it. By running a 66mhz processor, your program would run 2x as fast which in some cases was undesirable. Hence the Turbo button.
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First off 386s ran at 8 or 16 MHz (typically). Second, the purpose was to play older games that were tied directly to the clock and expecting to see 8 megahertz. So if you didn't enjoy playing Turbo Pacman or Turbo Wing Commander, you could press the button and slow everything to normal speed.
Aside-
I found an old laptop with a 386. I was surprised how responsive the machine was even though it's only ~0.02 GHz and a mere 0.01 gigabytes of RAM. Why is it that we could run Microsoft Word on such low specs
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First off 386s ran at 8 or 16 MHz (typically).
While 8 and 16Mhz was all that was available initially, it certainly wasn't uncommon to see 25 and 33 Mhz models later. AMD even put out 386SX and 386DX chips intended to ran at 40MHz and it was claimed by some to run faster than a 486@25MHz for some tasks. I had one of said SXs in my machine at the time and the machine certainly didn't do badly compared to the 486s running at 25MHz at school at the time (though I never ran anything to scientifically test the relative performance).
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If mature software architectures (su
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Why have programs grown so bloated.
My guess is these factors all play a role:
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>>>The industry as a whole (not real-time OS's or some portable / embedded device programming -- most of them still "get it") has adopted the view that programmer time is expensive and hardware is cheap.
>>>
They are probably right. When you can buy a brand new PC with 2 gigabytes and 2 gigahertz, and it only costs $300, there's no need to waste programmer time/labor expense trying to optimize the software to fit inside 0.01 GB or 0.01 GHz. In 1990 it was necessary to devote that labor tim
Laptops (Score:2)
When you can buy a brand new PC with 2 gigabytes and 2 gigahertz, and it only costs $300
Since when does a new laptop with 2 GB RAM and 2 GHz CPU cost 300 USD? I thought Microsoft was still limiting cheap "ULCPC" Windows licenses to smaller CPU and RAM.
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Back then, if the program didn't run on your hardware, especially an office suite designed for businesses, it was the software developer/packager's problem.
Now it's yours...
A combination of moving from lotus-quattro-wordperfect/ms office
to
just ms office, with maybe star office/open office if you know how.
Lack of competition was never a good thing.
That you need a more powerful computer to run the same software is considered a feature by microsoft, or at least, it seems to be, considering they act more like I
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Mt aforementioned 386 laptop has a turbo button. 16 MHz standard speed and 8 MHz with the turbo switch turned off.
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Re:My best guess.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody ever turned [the speedup button] off, so why have the button in the first place?
Nowadays, CPU speed settings are most useful for battery-powered computers to let the user trade off performance against battery life.
CPU-bound or not? (Score:2)
Except if it takes a longer time to run your task at lower speeds
Only if the task is CPU-bound. For a task that's memory-bound or disk-bound or network-bound or human-bound, Turbo Off could be a win. But you're right that things like the backlight don't scale the same way.
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The CPU could do hardware virtualization, but by default it was disabled in the BIOS. Why? I have no idea...
At least it could be turned on. Sony computers with processors that support virtualization have the feature disabled in the BIOS and there is no option to enable it.
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Hmm... not sure how true that is. I think because of the fact MS forced virtualization for XP mode, sony released a firmware update which enables you to change the setting.
My Vaio laptop was like that initially. I bought it with Vista installed (w/free upgrade to 7 when it came out). I applied to bios update and switched on virtualization after I installed 7.
So I guess the moral of the story is to check your chip; if it supports it, then check sony's site for a bios update.
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Hmm... not sure how true that is.
Here's the article [gizmodo.com] discussing it.
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"Hmm... not sure how true that is."
Very True. On HP laptops, both consumer and commercial, unless you paid for ABSOLUTE TOP OF THE LINE you got a processor with VT disabled in BIOS with no way to turn it on.
And this was before Vista even had its first service pack.
It's supposed to be disabled by default (Score:3, Informative)
It's to prevent hypervisor based rootkit attacks
https://www.microsoft.com/taiwan/whdc/system/platform/virtual/CPUVirtExt.mspx [microsoft.com]
For systems that are destined for a server role (and for only these systems), enable the virtualization extensions. The threat of running malicious code as an administrator on servers is reduced through Windows Server policies and organizational best practices.
For systems that are destined for a client role, disable (and lock off) the virtualization extensions.
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No, it is up to the processor manufacturer, whom provides the microcode that runs everything on-die.
INTEL disabled this, not the BIOS manufacturers - they don't have the microcode, Intel does.
begs the question (Score:2, Insightful)
This doesn't mean what you think it means. Why do some people (mostly nerds) insist on using this term, when it is obvious they don't know what it means or how to use it?
This must end.
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Example of begging the question:
Q: Provide evidence that the Christian God exists.
A: The Bible proves that God exists. The Bible is a reliable source because it is the word of God.
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the pic [komplexify.com]
the shirt [shirtaday.com]
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Great example. I like it.
Question though. (Just for fun, let me play Devil's Advocate for a minute, I know it's just an example, and I see what you're trying to educate here.)
If the question is "Provide evidence that the Christian God exists", and one definition the dictionary provided for "proof" is "anything serving as such evidence", and then if I provide the Bible as evidence, have I not offered proof?
Let me only slightly change the answer though: "The Bible helps prove God exists. The Bible is a re
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The example given on the web site is better:
To quote:
A simple example would be "I think he is unattractive because he is ugly." The adjective "ugly" does not explain why the subject is "unattractive" -- they virtually amount to the same subjective meaning, and the proof is merely a restatement of the premise. The sentence has begged the question.
http://begthequestion.info/
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Why do purveyors of prescriptivist poppycock insist that a term means something other than the meaning ascribed to it by the majority of native speakers?
The bigger announcement from MS today (Score:2, Interesting)
AMD was supported too (Score:2, Informative)
ars technica [arstechnica.com]
Thanks for pointing that out ColdWetDog.
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Clearly it isn't Intel over AMD, it could support both Intel VT and AMD-V. Don't throw out the hate without justification!
I think the claimed Intel/AMD distinction is not about which particular set of visualization helper modes were supported - it is about the differences in general availability of the features between the manufacturers. I think *all* recent AMD chips have the relevant support, whereas Intel are still segmenting their market by putting out chips both with and without - see http://news.cnet.com/some-intel-chips-dont-support-windows-7-xp-mode/ [cnet.com] for one example of this being discussed.
Randall C. Kennedy (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Randall C. Kennedy who got fired by InfoWorld? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Randall C. Kennedy (Score:5, Insightful)
If the editors paid a tenth as much attention to the story as the commentators did, I'll be pissed that they're giving this bozo even more traffic as a reward for passing bullshit off as fact.
Since they don't, I'll instead just have to remain pissed that the editors don't pay a tenth as much attention as the commentators do.
Hint for Slashdotters: anything posted by the Exo Performance Network is pure bullshit. Don't believe a syllable without independent verification.
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What makes you think Slashdot editors actually RTFA. They just got to the part were Microsoft was criticized and then hit the post button, who cares about the source of the information.
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It looks to me as if he's just got a sockpuppet he uses to troll people. Trolling means page views and page views means ad revenue. What's the problem really? He was writing for a bunch of IT trade rags, not the New York Times.
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Slashdot begs the question (Score:4, Funny)
Why all the begging?
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non VT runs dog slow (Score:3, Interesting)
i've run the desktop version of VMWare on my laptop and it's very slow compared to the VT version of Windows XP Mode on the same laptop.
it's the same old complaints. people want a feature but if it's not supported in hardware and runs extremely slow they will scream on the internets how stupid microsoft is for making it so slow on 6 year old hardware that otherwise runs Windows 7 very well
Ah, false dichotomies. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are many, many other possibilities than the two derogative possibilities offered. The one which seems most likely to me is that Microsoft thought "well, it's in all new hardware, it probably isn't worth the time and cost of implementing a software solution," only to find out that market demand existed.
Another possibility is that it took them time to produce an implementation of sufficient quality.
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Unfortunately, the software only thing was the way Virtual PC (which is whats actually being used) until the most recent versions, where they went from software only to hardware only virtually over night for no readily apparent reason other than they could do it.
Makes sense too (Score:2)
Really, I'd say if you don't have a chip that supports VT/AMD-V you don't really want to be using XP mode. It is going to be all kinds of slow. This is partially because VT speeds up virtualization but also because it implies an older CPU. After all, ALL Core 2s and up have VT, as do some Pentium Ds. You want a reasonable amount of hardware to run Windows 7 and then run XP on top of it. I don't think that this was an unreasonable requirement.
However, some people seem to think they should be able to do all t
For Windows 7 Home Premium? (Score:2)
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With Home Premium, you will still need to use VMWare or another 3rd party program for your virtualisation requirements. The full version of Virtual PC might work, but XP mode won't. The main difference I suppose is that the other programs don't ship with a copy of Windows XP, whereas XP Mode for Windows 7 Pro and above does. Also, I don't think you get the seamless mode, you have to run XP within the program window, or access it remotely using RDP or VNC.
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Well actually, XP Mode doesn't ship at all (probably to save space on the retail disk) but has to be downloaded. But the license to use it only comes with Pro and above. Seamless mode is indeed available, though Virtual PC's isn't as good as VMWare's Unity (ironically enough)
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Officially, it's only available for Windows 7 professional. But I think that's only on the honor system through the download page. It's not "supported" on home premium. Though I've never tried it, since I'm a Mac user too (running XP in VirtualBox and only for IE6,7,8).
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(And yes I'm really curious, I use XP Pro but not 7. The members of our MIS team who have tried 7 have run into some issues so we haven't adopted it yet. I'm holding out until they have time to pick it apart before I spend any real time on it.)
Virtual PC blog (Score:5, Informative)
Explanation of this decision [msdn.com] from Virtual PC blog:
Why is Microsoft making this change to Virtual PC now?
Because of you :-) We have heard loud and clear from customers that they need to be able to run Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode on systems that do not have hardware virtualization support. So we are going to enable this.
Why did Microsoft release Windows Virtual PC without this in the first place?
There are two main reasons here.
The first is that we believe that customers will get the best virtualization experience on computers with hardware virtualization support. This has not changed – and even though we are releasing this update I would strongly encourage anyone who is looking at buying a new computer, and intends to use virtualization, to make sure that they get a system that is capable of supporting hardware virtualization.
The second is that we had hoped that by the time Windows Virtual PC released – hardware virtualization support would be prevalent enough that this would not be an issue. We were wrong on that. Bummer.
So, if they published a patch (Score:2)
I actually rtfa and there's no sign of one. I really can't be bothered searching MS site to find one as the CPU on this machine has VT on CPU and enabled in BIOS
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"Important This update supports only Windows XP Service Pack 3 virtual machines."
Hardware virtualization is simpler... (Score:2)
The answer is probably that hardware virtualization is simply easier to implement. MS wanted to get the feature out of the door and to customers. They probably expect that a large number of Windows 7 users are on newer hardware likely to have VT. Then later updated the software to support software based virtualization in order to allow it to function for more people.
Adding features (in this case software virtualization support) through updates is hardly newsworthy...
Ars has a much better write up (Score:5, Informative)
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/microsoft-removes-vm-hardware-requirements-from-xp-mode.ars [arstechnica.com]
Why the hell is this Exo-Blog post being cited? The author of TFA doesn't cite a goddamn thing.
Begs != raises (Score:4, Interesting)
But this mistake is so common, so many people are using it this way, it is high time we start de linking "begs the question" from "petitio principii".
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So the only way to understand why "begs the question" does not mean "raises the question" is because of how someone in history mis-translated the original latin?
Rather than complain about the current usage of "begs the question" how about re-translating "petito principii"?
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Rather than complain about the current usage of "begs the question" how about re-translating "petito principii"?
You expect Latin to evolve in the same way English evolves? Sorry, mate. Latin and the people who wrote and spoke it have been dead a long time. You'll have as much luck changing their minds as you would removing the nail from that dead parrot and getting him to perch more comfortably.
Kudos to the OP for an intelligent post.
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You expect Latin to evolve in the same way English evolves?
I expect Latin to stay the same, but someone along the way went and tried to translate some latin to english, and they failed. So now there is an English phrase that has a meaning that does not match up to the words used. I expect people to re-evaluate what things that were done in the past to see if they match up with the present or the future.
The whole "begs the question" debate is that many people want to use the phrase literally, while others have attached a very weird meaning to that collection of wo
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Aren't You the Pedant (Score:4, Informative)
In common English, as practiced by most people "begs the question" no longer means "petitio principii". It now means "this information begs that a question be asked, that wasn't".
Of course, we are in a transition. "Begs the question" in taken as logical fallacy by some, and as colloquial expression by others.
There is a perfectly reasonable expression used to replace "Begs the question" -- circular reasoning.
Re:You know what begs the question? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Slashdot these days is that has no taste, absolutely no taste.
Tag article as randalckennedy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You know what begs the question? (Score:5, Funny)
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Is it bashing Apple to point out that they do they same thing to OSX?
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Re:seems a bit of a conspiracy theory to me (Score:5, Insightful)
On one hand, XP Mode in 7 actually uses Virtual PC, which has been around for a long time - but didn't require hardware virtualization support until the most recent version.
On the other hand, while I can't find that link now, I do recall seeing one of VPC guys explaining that they went hardware-only for the new release simply because it allowed them to cut out a lot of code, which then no longer needs to be supported. In which case it may be that they have realized that it's a bad idea from business perspective, and put that code back in (and brought it up to date) with that patch.
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On the other hand, while I can't find that link now, I do recall seeing one of VPC guys explaining that they went hardware-only for the new release simply because it allowed them to cut out a lot of code, which then no longer needs to be supported.
Well, yes. x86 "Software virtualization" is an awful hack. All that code examination and patching. Getting rid of that machinery is a big win from the developer perspective.
From a development perspective, you'd like to get rid of 16-bit mode, mixed 16/32
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Also, it's not like hardware virtualization is exceedingly rare, either. On current AMD processors, for example, only the Sempron line doesn't support it. You also don't need to turn it on in the BIOS on AMD processors either: It either has it or it doesn't. It was actually a safe bet. I'm deliberately pointing out AMD's processors here, too, to show that it really couldn't have been a concession to Intel.
Re:seems a bit of a conspiracy theory to me (Score:5, Insightful)
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This has nothing to do with the Guest OS. Hardware virtualization acceleration is dependent on the host OS - specifically, the virtual machine software itself.
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