104 replies to this topic

[L A M A]

Or? Maybe you don't deserve a cent because you come here, learn from reboot.pro (aka formally bootland) and take next step pretending to be more advanced?

since you guys are commercial, by coming here, obviously you want people to get diverted to your forum next?
there, let me help you http://www.vmlite.com/index.php/forums

[huisinro]

If you don't like it, don't use it. To say something useless is ignorant. We have started VBoot long before VMLite came out. Check our forum for our annocements. I don't know what you refer to "learn from bootland"? You think we steal treat secrets here?

As a Stanford PhD, I have high standard.

Edited by huisinro, 22 December 2010 - 08:30 PM.

[sambul61]

When writes are supported, win98/95 vhd should boot nicely too.

Why Win98 VHD requires a different approach to boot compare to Win2000?

Will you add a feature to prepare a Win98 VHD from a hard drive to your VHD app?

Since we're talking about old PCs and OSs now (having old archives accessible is an important part of what virtual environment is about), do you see a way to convert to VHD & emulate & boot a Classic Motorola specific MacOS install (the one developed by Steve Wozniak )

[huisinro]

i.e., we announced VBoot when VMLite came online first day, perhaps 2 years ago. And I came to know boot-land because someone posted a thread on VMLite. The accusation of stealing ideas here is totally groudless.

Edited by huisinro, 22 December 2010 - 08:45 PM.

[L A M A]

I never used it and the way you come here asking people to use it, looks like a Stanford PhD guy promoted to "salesman" (no offense) . All this looks like (for example) AMD guys coming into Intel's forum showing off their new product. thought of you guys trying to patent is further delightful, as of now (obviously I'm being sarcastic)


edit: amazing how after two years, a highly respected PhD guy finally drops but... here

[huisinro]

very different! Windows NT, 2k and later OSes uses kernel drivers to access harddisks directly, while 95/98/DOS uses BIOS to access harddisk even after boot. So in order to boot 95/98 from a single file, the BIOS emulation must support writes. Currently, VBoot only supports read operation at BIOS level, we need to extent it to write operations, then 95/98 should be able to boot from a single file.

As for MAC, totally different stuff. We have made Linux boot from vhd files, we may implement to make latest Mac OS X to boot from vhd, but not our top priority for now.

Why Win98 VHD requires a different approach to boot compare to Win2000?

Will you add a feature to prepare a Win98 VHD from a hard drive to your VHD app?

Since we're talking about old PCs and OSs now (having old archives accessible is an important part of what virtual environment is about), do you see a way to convert to VHD & emulate & boot a Classic Motorola specific MacOS install (the one developed by Steve Wozniak )

[L A M A]

Maybe i would have started to respect if i knew more about you? but that was not the case... it clearly looked like bombing G4D+FiraDisk+WinvBlock+NT6.x fast installer+MSFN. Let me get this straight, this software is not even free for Home use?

[huisinro]

someone mentioned Firadisk at our forum, which was first time I heard of Firadisk. VBoot was annouced before firadisk, check out our forums.

About license, as I said, right now it's a temporary thing, most likely we may offer a limited license to personal use. As you can see from VMLite, we are not the type of guys that want to make $ from any product. We started development since 2005 on vmlite, haven't made any money yet from it.

Maybe i would have started to respect if i knew more about you? but that was not the case... it clearly looked like bombing G4D+FiraDisk+WinvBlock+NT6.x fast installer+MSFN. Let me get this straight, this software is not even free for Home use?

[L A M A]

Like you, i had no idea of any vboot getting developed. Can I post a detailed information about FiraDisk and all existing solutions of reboot.pro vs your vboot at your forums? I think we'll be doing the great job of spreading the information, I would love to point out guides (specially)

[L A M A]

Is this "immutable boot sessions" something like mapping xxx.xx image on ram (ram disk???) if not, is there any such ram-booting option?

[huisinro]

ram boot is not exported yet. immutable refers to differencing disks. After reboot, the diff to the base image will be deleted.

Internally, vboot does support ram loading, but it takes long time to load the image, so i am so sure how useful it is. We will try to export the features for people to use if they want to load the image to ram.

[L A M A]

Some people like fast booting, but I like fast operations after OS boots up. If you cannot find uses AND pros and cons of Ram-booting,... are you sure you're PhD?


looking at your joined date, and your current blasting product information, you've kept silent for quite a while (unless i've missed your earlier post )

[ireneuszp]

VBOOT 1.0 final version is out!
http://bbs.wuyou.com...16&extra=page=1

http://u.115.com/file/f364c84d92#

[Wonko the Sane]

@L
Take it easy man, no reason to accuse anyone of stealing anything.

@huisinro
With all due respect to you and Stanford , the licensing of the app is NOT - as you may seem to think - a triviality.

I mean you are perfectly free (as in freedom ) to release your app with whatever License you like, but you have to respect the terms of the license and it would be nice if the Terms of it are:

• clear
• correct

Right now the status seems like :

a Commercial app released as a time-limited trial with the limitation of non-business use, using Open Source software WITHOUT releasing the accompanying source code for it and re-distributing non-redistributable Microsoft files.

If it's Commercial, you may be very near the border (or beyond it) of breaking Rule #4 of the board:
http://reboot.pro/82/

If it contains Open Source code, the GNU license binds you to release the source of the modifications also.

If it contains non-redistributable files you may be violating your MS EULA and what not (BTW your problem, not ours ).

In any case, it would be nice if you could highlight the time-limited status of the app, since most people won't read the license, the limitation:

(2) This trial version expires on Feb 15, 2011. After expiration, you won't
be able to use the SOFTWARE to boot your physical computer, and a crash
BSOD error will occur.

appears like a severe one, as it may cause people - in perfect good faith - to have their PC's unable to boot on Feb 16, 2011.


Wonko

[maanu]

and it is the only reason why im not even thinking of using this tool , GNU license is there for just showing off????
funny trial expiry method by the way . who has the time for making and testing something to be expired on 16th feb ? not me .
thanks.

[al_jo]

...

[huisinro]

GNU license is there not for showing off, the code we modified on virtualbox has commited back to vbox, and GRUB2 we implement an independent module on most stuff, which doesn't have to be open sourced. We modified the parser and display system, which we can submit to GRUB2 team anytime, and we will post the source code.

Again, if any of you don't like it, feel free not to use it. It's your own choice. We posted the product here because I thought that it's releated to this community, we have more than enough users in our forums to test our products, and so far, people like it very much from emails feedbacks.

[Wonko the Sane]

GNU license is there not for showing off, the code we modified on virtualbox has commited back to vbox, and GRUB2 we implement an independent module on most stuff, which doesn't have to be open sourced. We modified the parser and display system, which we can submit to GRUB2 team anytime, and we will post the source code.

Again, if any of you don't like it, feel free not to use it. It's your own choice. We posted the product here because I thought that it's releated to this community, we have more than enough users in our forums to test our products, and so far, people like it very much from emails feedbacks.

No need to become aggressive.

The issue I raised is NOT about the quality of the software or it's usability (which everyone might like or dislike) only about the confusing or lacking information about it's licensing scheme and it's limitations.

It seems to me that you have not yet a clear idea of the future of the project (Open Source/Commercial/Free for non-business users, etc.), and the "we will" is not in any way a compliance (now) with the GNU license.

The fact that vboot is currently a time-limited trial was NOT publicized.

That's all.

The (few) users getting to vboot through boot-land reboot.pro are now perhaps more informed about the app and it's licensing status, thus they can - knowingly - decide to either register at vmlite.com and test the app - or avoid doing it.

Before, anyone had (like I did) to register BEFORE knowing that what is offered is a time-limited trial. (which again, is a perfectly legitimate choice).

I just like calling things with their names and - whenever possible - avoid misunderstandings.

Specifically what I was interested in avoiding was that a less experienced user could "adopt" your Beta as "main" means of booting and find himself/herself with an unbootable system on February 16th, 2011.

or, if you prefer, when and if someone will come here whining about this problem, I will be able to say, "See, I had TOLD you!"




Wonko

[huisinro]

will explicitly add the trial period ending date (Apr-15-2011 from next update) beside the download area.

[huisinro]

we are also implementing a unique RAM booting feature that should speed up performance when booting from a virtual disk file.

Basically you reserve a memory region at boot time, and VBoot will use this region to cache disk read/writes. In contrast to other RAM booting, ours is not slow even at the first start time. We don't load all bits to memory at the very first beginning, we do it at the first read of sectors.

This way, you will be able to load 16G disk file with 2G memory reserved for use, for example. So it can handle large disk files, and also possible to persist changes back to disk if configured to do so.

[sambul61]

That sounds like a step forward, if will indeed allow to fast boot images with a command similar to map --mem in G4D, which now requires considerable time to read a large image to memory.

Regarding 16Gb disk to fit into 2Gb reserved RAM by subsequent reads, are you saying that discarded previous portion will never be required to access any longer? Or read will be repeated each time, when access is again required to that portion? It may actually slow down overall performance after boot, hence sounds like a tradeoff rather then clear performance improvement.

Would you consider offering a Free Licence for personal use for Vboot, while requiring Pay Licence for VMLite (or vice versa, or a product line with raising feature sets)? The reason seems to be in the very basic fact that you use Grub 2 for booting files, and its free. Or it won't work that way? Generally, asking to pay doesn't guarantee by itself much profit, unless suplemented by a strong marketing plan, especially when market (demand) is under-developed, while offering strong free boot soft choices.

[huisinro]

basically a cache, offset->buffer, if there is no memory left, some portions will be discarded and commit to file.

current ram booting only handles small file size, we are trying to see if this can extend to real hard disk image, like the one I have is 250G vhd file from my laptop cloning. Our boot loader can handle reading/parsing a huge file.

Yes, it's a trade off, need lots of experimenting as how much performance gain.

For small size of virtual disk file, our algorithm is same as other ones, as it will cache all disk operations in memory, except it boots very fast since not loading the whole file at once. For example, if you have xp vhd which is 2G in capacity, and you reseve 2G memory, then eveything will be done in RAM.

[huisinro]

As I said earlier, yes, we are considering a free license for personal use.

VBoot has 2 parts, the boot loader portion never expires. The one that currently expires is the windows disk driver inside the virtual disk file.

Even the boot loader itself has lots of development work as how to read a huge file in real mode. To the best of my knowledge, no other boot loaders can read a large (e.g. 250G) file stored randomly on real hard disk, and treat it as virtual disk.

[sambul61]

It sounds like an interesting complementary idea, if you can implement it relatively flawless. Regarding writing excess to file, an HD would need sufficient extra space to accept most of a large VHD image copy, while write time may be significant on older disks. Still it may be a useful workaround to boot a large VHD.

[Hjanos95]

I was able to boot XP Vboot from USB hard disk.
I tested it on 3 different computers, worked fine.
Here is how can we do this:
Start installing xp to a vhd.
When it copied the files, don't continue with the 2nd step.
Boot into other Windows download UsbBootWatcher.zip from here: www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=22473&st=0
Also download usb_xp_init.cmd from here: www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopi...920&#entry153920
Unzip UsbBootWatcher.zip and put usb_xp_init.cmd into the folder we have just extracted UsbBootWatcher. The directory structure should look like this:
amd64 - directory
x86 - directory
usb_xp_init.cmd

Boot into a Windows as SYSTEM (for example Win7PE) and mount vhd.
You can also use in XP the "at hours:minutes /interactive cmd" command to get a command promt with SYSTEM user privileges.
Run usb_xp_init.cmd and type the path of system32 directory of the mounted vhd. (for examle D:\Windows\system32)
When it completed unmount the vhd, put it in the USB hard disk and create entry in grub.cfg for it (We need to use UUID= or LABEL= format).
(We need to create one for continue setup, and one without cdrom to run normally)
I suggest to set registry setting DisablePagingExecutive to 1 in HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management before continue setup.