> VMware was probably based on M Rosenblum's graduate work on SimOS, which was GPL. I worked on VMware's virtual machine monitor from 2000 to 2009. Mendel's st

> VMware was probably based on M Rosenblum's graduate work on SimOS, which was GPL. I worked on VMware's virtual machine monitor from 2000 to 2009. Mendel's students' work on SimOS had nothing at all to do with VMware, full-stop; SimOS was just a full-system simulator, useful for measurement and educational purposes, which has almost nothing to do with virtualization. The research system of Mendel's that did influence VMware's founding was Disco[0], a virtual machine monitor for SGI's MIPS machines. But the technique Disco used (trap-and-emulate) was inapplicable on x86, and in fact there was peer-reviewed literature claiming the x86 was impossible to virtualize[1]. VMware's first six years of products were instead based on dynamic binary translation; we incrementally recompiled the privileged x86 guest into unprivileged x86 code, in much the same way modern JVMs incrementally compile Java bytecodes into native machine instructions. Our source base was 100% VMware proprietary, and had to be since no open source project was trying anything remotely related at the time. [0] http://www-flash.stanford.edu/~bugnion/Disco/sosp-html/ http://www-flash.stanford.edu/~bugnion/Disco/sosp-html/ [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1251316&dl=ACM&coll=portal http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1251316&dl=ACM&col....