Well, I have a vision for hypervisors and VMMs, but one that will likely not happen. See, I have a few legacy applications around the office here that must run on the Sparc architecture, and usually must run on Solaris on Sparc. Now, recently I've started using binary translation applications provided by a certain vendor to run these applications on 64-bit Linux. While this works very well, it occured to me that it would be very, very cool to combine a Sparc emulator into one of the hypervisor sets.

There's a project out there called Qemu that provides Linux binary emulation/translation as well as full system emulation. The project will emulate Sparc, x86(64), PPC, mips, sh6, etc., CPUs for either running Linux binaries on these architectures or for running full system emulators. The degree to which each architecture is supported, especially on the system emulation side, is pretty limited, but it would be really, really cool if you could pull up your favorite virtual machine manager and not only have the choice of which O/S you want to install, but what CPU architecture you'd like to run it on.

I realize there would be several objections to this. First, it kind of violates the line between "virtualization" and "emulation." Virtualization is simply splitting the available architecture between multiple O/Ss and controlling access and isolating the O/Ss from one another. Emulation, on the other hand, requires that CPU instructions be translated from one architecture to the physical architecture running underneath it all. Another issue that would come up is performance, especially given that the emulation must be done.

Still, it doesn't seem all that different to me. I'm just an IT guy who wants to be able to run many virtual machines or guests on a single piece of hardware. You can call it what you like underneath the hood, but it would be really nice to be able to choose the architecture of the guest machine.

Like I said, probably a dream that may never come true, but now it's out there...