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Brought up several times in our forums and elsewhere over the past few days has been VMware's Gallium3D driver that they use for guest 3D acceleration on their proprietary virtualization platform. Compared to Oracle's VM VirtualBox graphics acceleration support that is quite slow for OpenGL and often unreliable or the limited attempts at OpenGL QEMU acceleration, VMware has a rather nice acceleration architecture built atop Gallium3D. Using Gallium3D at the heart of their graphics driver implementation across platforms shouldn't be surprising though since they bought out Tungsten Graphics in late 2008 and its these Mesa / Gallium3D drivers now developing VMware's graphics stack.

ThoughtPolice was born because I kept needing to use the same VMware images over and over again. A google search later, and I had found no place which provided a variety of VMware images. Thinking others would find these images useful, I made them public. Over the months, more and more VMware images were added, and the range expanded to include FreeBSD, evolving into the current day website. Less than one year since launch, the website has led to more than 370 terabytes of downloads through BitTorrent alone, without which we would be unable to handle the bandwidth requirements. Recently SourceForge was added as primary source for the web downloads, allowing people who cannot use BitTorrent to still use the website. The website is aimed both at sys admins like myself who need to get an operating system up and running very quickly, and people who just want to try Linux or FreeBSD out.

"Save time and money: leverage the best free open source software to do more with less. It just works: get ready-to-use solutions up and running in minutes on bare metal, a virtual machine, or in the cloud. # Secure and easy to maintain: auto-updated daily with latest security patches. # 100% Open Source: free from expensive and restrictive proprietary licensing. Easy to customize and extend to build new appliances from the closest existing starting point. Based on Ubuntu 8.04.3: a Long Term Support release. "

Free, easy to setup wikis, blogs, forums and many other web applications that you can run locally or in the cloud. BitNami makes deploying server software a simple and enjoyable process.

The idea is to design simple computers, similar in complexity to vintage homecomputers. These computers are never built, but simulated on a PC. A standard PC will typically be able to run dozens or hundreds of these virtual machines at once. This is where the magic begins: The microcomputers are equipped with communication devices, allowing them to connect and talk to each other. The goal is to see useful structures grow spontaneously, like crystals. By keeping the microcomputer architecture very simple, the emulation software can also be kept small and simple. This allows for rigorous verification. The benefits of completing this process are tremendous: If the emulation software is correct, untrusted code can be run without worry as emulated code can never escape out of the emulator. Other important benefits of the emulation approach include the ability to suspend, resume, clone, inspect or modify running programs at any time. Programs can also be easily sent through the network. The prototype is a Java-based software currently under development. It is already able to run simple programs. The computer design currently supported is called MVM (Minimal Virtual Machine). MVM's processor knows only a single instruction, subleq (subtract and branch if less or equal). In previous work, the instruction usually has only one addressing mode (mem/mem); for practical purposes, I added a second addressing mode (const/mem). The MVM processor has no registers or flags. MVM supports virtual devices that are mapped into its linear address space. Typical devices include an arithmetic unit, a system clock and a virtual video chip.