Plex86: An 180x86 Virtual Machine

What is virtualization ?
It is desirable to be able to run multiple operating systems simultaneously:
-in order to simultaneously run application software written for dierent operating systems
-in order to debug system software using a fully equipped host debugging environment
-in order to consolidate management of a great number of heterogeneous PC environments in an enterprise to a small set of virtual machine servers.

One could attempt to emulate the complete hardware environment | BOCHS
-Pro: works on any platform, emulators are portable -Con: this is very slow

One could attempt to emulate the API of the different operating systems | WINE, UML
-This requires the host platform to be the same as the platform of the emulated operating system
-The emulated API needs to be fully documented, which is not the case for most commercial systems

The intermediate solution is virtualization | plex86
-Emulate instructions in the guest OS which access features which can not be used concurrently with the host OS
*The peripheral devices
*System instructions
-Create an environment which will allow all other instructions to be executed natively by the processor