When Intel designed the Pentium, they gave it the ability to emulate a virtual 386 machine. Various programs that use this capability have been written, notably Bochs, but the one that is generating the most interest in the last while is VMWare.

VMWare allows you to boot a virtual machine in a window. This virtual machine may run the same guest operating system as does the host system (perhaps useful for testing software) or, most interesting, a completely different operating system. To date, VMWare has supported Linux and various Windows systems as hosts. As guest operating systems, VMWare supports Linux, MS DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT 4 (workstation or server), 2000, Solaris 7 and FreeBSD. Unfortunately, VMWare hasn't chosen to support OS/2 as a host operating system.

But the good news is that they are in the process of supporting OS/2 as a guest operating system, specifically OS/2 Warp 4 with Fixpack 12. VMWare has just released a beta version that has experimental support for OS/2. This beta is available both as a tarball and a RPM package.

Given that I run Mandrake 7 as my main Linux, I applied for the beta license and downloaded the RPM. I had been running an earlier version (1.12) of VMWare that had been installed as a RPM package. One of the nice features about RPM is that upgrading installed packages is very easy. Installing the beta of version 2 over the existing VMWare version was non-problematical, as expected. I used the VMWare Configuration Wizard to set up a virtual machine for OS/2; this was a straightforward procedure although the resultant memory settings were incorrect. I had set the virtual machine to use 64 MB but the wizard decided to only allot 32 MB to the virtual machine; this resulted in some poor performance before I noticed the error.

My machine is home-built, with an Asus P5A motherboard, AMD K6-2 300 MHz CPU (AMD only rated it at 266 MHz, mind you), 128 MB RAM, Matrox G200 with a mix of SCSI and IDE drives and devices. From my experience with VMWare 1.12, I'd say this is close to the minimum requirements as Win98 was no speed demon in a WMWare machine with this hardware. In particular, VMWare says that 96 MB of RAM is required. As I've only just installed it and got it running with OS/2, this is very much just a preliminary report.

I hauled out my familiar blue and white box of OS/2 Warp 4, put the CD in the drive and the Installation diskette in the floppy drive. One starts a virtual machine by pressing a virtual power button, naturally enough, on the toolbar of the VMWare window. This results first in a complaint about my mouse, a Logitech PS/2 FirstMouse+, not being supported and that this will make full screen VGA unavailable to me. This never proved to be a problem. A standard boot sequence followed, with the virtual Phoenix BIOS counting down the RAM, the detection of IDE devices and the notification that one can press F2 to enter Setup. There were only two notable features about this, firstly that it was occurring in an xterm on my KDE desktop and I had full use of the rest of my system and secondly, that it was slow. Quite slow. Painfully slow. In their documentation about the beta, VMWare say that it is not optimized for performance and has additional overhead. This is rather evident.

After the BIOS boot stage, the OS/2 installation boot from floppy started absolutely normal. In fact the whole installation of OS/2 proceeded utterly normally and with out event. Did I mention that it was slow? The entire install took about 3 hours. VMWare presents a virtual hardware environment to the guest OS, presenting a virtual Sound Blaster 16 as a sound card, a virtual AMD PCI ethernet card and a generic VGA video device. This beta doesn't provide sound card support for OS/2, though. Neither does it provide SCSI support directly, however my SCSI CD drive was virtualised as an IDE CD drive and works fine in the virtual machine.

I have Samba working in the host Linux system and my main use of Win98 in a VMWare box is for learning/experimenting with Samba. So when it came time to select the networking options for OS/2 during the installation, I selected File and Print Client as well as TCP/IP so that I could connect the virtual OS/2 machine to my Samba server. Unfortunately, the NetBEUI/NetBIOS/NetBIOS over TCP/IP system doesn't work properly in a VMWare window (in my brief experience) and, although it seemed to install OK, never loads the device drivers during the OS/2 boot.

However, configuration of the TCP/IP services was straightforward and easy. I had chosen to have bridged networking to my real ethernet card (although it's not connected to any network) and to not have host-only networking enabled. This virtual ethernet card and my real ethernet card form a virtual private LAN. My net connection is ppp via a modem connection to my ISP. I set the host ethernet card to be default gateway, set the nameservers to my ISP's nameservers and I had a net connection working.

At this point I had the basic installation of OS/2 complete and net connectivity. However, the video was generic VGA and wasn't giving very good performance. VMWare supplies a toolkit for each guest OS that one is supposed to install after the guest system is installed. Among other utilities it provides a custom SVGA driver, allowing for much better video performance. I downloaded and unzipped the file in Linux, then transferred the unarchived files via ftp into the OS/2 virtual machine over the virtual LAN. However, the toolkit wouldn't install as it said that I had an incorrect version of OS/2 installed.

This reminded me that VMWare states Fixpack 12 is required. So off I trundled to ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/ps/products/os2/fixes/v4warp/english-us/xr_m012/ and downloaded the disk images. I went to hobbes and picked up QuickFix, a nice utility to install fixpacks from a hard disk using the downloaded disk images instead of having to make floppies. (ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/system/patches/fixpack/qf121.zip) This installed FixPack 12, which allowed me to install the VMWare Tools for OS/2. Once I had the tools installed, I was able to have the mouse automatically released upon hitting the edge of the window (instead of being jailed to the window) and to set the video to 1024 x768 in 16.7 million colors. The results can be seen in the accompanying screenshot.

That's as far as I've gotten with OS/2 in VMWare. I'm very much looking forward to the polished release product which I hope has significantly better performance than the beta, sound card and SCSI support.

A few closing comments, from my brief experience: firstly, make sure you give the virtual machine at least 64 MB of RAM. As mentioned, my virtual machine was initially set for only 32 MB and was glacially slow as a result. Secondly, VMWare has defaulted to having debugging monitoring code enabled. Unless you are trying to track down a bug or a problem, I suggest you reset it to a normal logging level. Both of these changes, coupled with use of the VMWare SVGA video driver, resulted in large performance gains. Although still slow, I'd say that OS/2 in a VMWare box is usable.

And isn't that grand?

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