Hi all, I just got a N810 and I've seen some KDE running on the N810. I'm a student and I'm planning to port a virtual machine to the N810 in order to run some linux desktops. However, I'm totally new to this and I would appreciate any help to get me started.

Few questions that I have:
What is a good virtual machine to port to the N810?
Are there porting guides out there?
What would be a suitable OS to install on the VM?
and the approximate time needed to complete such a project.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

qemu is really more of an emulator than a virtual machine, but I don't know of many virtual machines that run an ARM host. This looks interesting: http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenARM

Most applications written in C or C++ are simple to "port" if they're written well, because they don't make any assumptions about the hardware they're running on. In that case they just need a recompile. This is definitely not true for virtualization apps: By there very nature they need to be coded for a specific instruction set. I don't know of any straightforward guides for doing that, but once you pick a VM to port, it should be easier to find specific information about porting that VM.

Anything that runs, and takes less than 64MB or so of memory.

If you have lots of experience in C, but don't know assembly it could take you maybe a year or more (?). Possibly less if you have lots of time and you're a fast learner.

No problem. I wish you the best of luck.

Thanks for the reply johnx.

The VM I want to port is the Linux KVM, and hopefully run Puppy Linux as the guest OS due to its low resource requirement.

I've been researching and reading about KVM. Many tutorials I find suggest KVM only runs on Intel and AMD hosts (vmx and svm) where hardware supports are available. However, the offical KVM site states that KVM also working with SMP hosts.

So, here are my questions and something I can't confirm:
Does N810 have SMP?
Is it possible to port Linux KVM to the N810?
Any general guideline to tackle my project? (since I'm still relative new to all these.)

Your help is greatly appreciated.

SMP means symmetric multi processing; it's just describimg a computer thqt has more that one CPU (or these days, more than one core). If KVM requires specific hardware virtualization support then you won't really be 'porting' it, you'll be rewriting it from scratch.
Now some questions for you so we can try to answer you questions better:
1) What is your experience level with C and ARM assembly?
2) What is your experience with low level programming?

+john

1) I've had quite a lot of C programming experience with previous courses, and I believe I'm quite good and comfortable with C programming. I don't have any experience with ARM assembly, however, I did do some assembly programming in a few courses and did quite OK.

2) With that said, I'd say my low level programming experience to be somewhere between newbie to intermediate. But hey, I do consider myself to be a fast learner and I'm willing to learn .

Well, you have many options open to you. First of all, disregard the linux kvm website and start looking at the linux kvm developer mailing lists. It looks like someone is working on a PowerPC port of KVM. That might give you some ideas about the the processor dependent parts. Second of all, you should probably also take a look at Xen for ARM again since they have made some progress and it's always better to contribute then start from scratch. Third: Keep in mind that you're talking about virtualization, not emulation. AFAIK, puppylinux does not have an ARM port (not that this would be very hard); virtualization means running another OS compiled for the same architecture. For a lightweight linux system to virtualize you might be interested in OE/Angstrom (openembedded.org angstrom-distribution.org). Good luck!

-John

Please don't take this the wrong way; I don't want to insult your intelligence, you probably already know this, and I'm just inserting random (self aggrandizing) noise into this thread.

You are aware that it is possible to run quite a few linux desktops on the tablets without using a virtual machine? You can run a second desktop in a chroot using a nested X server (I use Xephyr). My Easy Debian project allows you to put a different Linux distro (in this case, Debian) into an image file and then chroot into it and run applications from within it. A chroot, however, is just a virtual environment, not a virtual machine, so you don't need compatible libraries, but you do have to have a compatible kernel...

Is there a specific reason that you wish to go the route of full virtualization? Do you want a different kernel?

Yes, I'm aware that the N810 can run some linux desktops. The whole reason I'm trying to port a virtual machine to the internet tablet is that it's a school project. I took the project after seeing KDE and Debian running on the tablet, thinking the project would be a great learning experience and can be done in similar manner. Now, of course, I'v realized they are totally different things. But I did learn quite a lot about linux through my digging.