>This is the way DISCO works. Its benefit is that virtualised code
>*could* run faster,
The other advantage of Disco was that it was virtualising a sane machine
architecture, where the CPU itself was mostly already virtualisable. One
of the reasons that an OS running under VMWare or Plex86 is so much
slower than the native machines is that they have to cope with the
braindead x86 architecture.
>the disadvantage is that there is no "host" so
>all OSes need to be virtualised
And also there's no OS to provide services for the VM itself. This means
that you'll need to import big chunks of code from somewhere else to
provide support for the VM. I think Disco avoided this problem by having
a copy of IRIX sitting dormant on the machine that it transferred
control to when doing any kind of complicated I/O or for servicing
devices, but which was generally kept out of the way.
Paul
