Thierry de Coulon wrote:
> I haven't tried qemu on Gentoo yet - my previous testing (with or without 
> kernel module) showed a dramatic lack of speed (at least when powering a 
> virtual machine running Windows).

Current cvs / the next qemu version will allow more to be virtualized 
(and therefore require less emulation), and people are reporting speeds 
in the same ballpark as vmware -- though I haven't tried the additional 
virtualization myself yet.  See [1] and the rest of the thread.

> I'm a supporter of open source, but there *are* closed source programs that 
> perform better sometime (note that there also are closed source programs that 
> perform worse...)

VMware is most certainly a very good and polished product and faster 
than qemu at the moment, I agree with you 100% there.  Mentioning qemu 
was just an idea for people who didn't want to spend any money :)

Also qemu has some interesting extra features, though these will 
probably be of lesser interest to people who only wish to run windows.

> But I'll keep an eye on quemu - that by the way I believe is free but not 
> really open source, but maybe I'm mistaking.

Qemu itself is LGPL, the kernel module is proprietary (but gratis). 
There is a GPL'd kernel module (qvm86[2]) that does the same job and 
hopefully this situation will improve in the future (i.e. both 
maintainers working on a GPL'd kernel module).

Marco

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2006-02/msg00110.html
[2] http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/qvm86/
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