• FAUmachine - opensource, runs unmodified OSes?
  • vmware - commercial
  • win4lin - commercial. Only does the 9x family? And Windows ME?
  • simics - commercial - does alpha, mips, sparc and x86, among others. Has trial licenses.
  • wine - opensource. x86 only? In dcslib. Unlike most stuff here, it can sometimes run windows apps without a windows license, but it can sometimes do a better job with a license.
  • QEMU is intended to allow running linux/x86 binaries (including wine) on linux/non-x86 machines.

    Sun Mar 20 09:52:16 PST 2005
    I finally found a chance (reason) to check out qemu, and I'm very impressed. It's not all that blazing fast, running an i386 guest OS on an i386 host OS, however, there's a non-opensource accelerator module that is supposed to help with that, and without that accelerator, the emulation appears to be flawless so far. I've used it to boot a DragonFly BSD .iso, and install it into an 18 gigabyte "disk" (really a large file created with dd and reblock), and it's just working beautifully. It didn't require a special version of the OS (like Xen would), and I haven't seen any glitches yet.

  • plex86 - opensource. x86 only. Has abandoned supporting closed-source OSes like windows?
  • bochs - opensource. Should be able to run x86 binaries on anything include solaris, irix, tru64. I tried it under redhat and it eventually toasted my DOS filesystem file, sometime well before Feb 24, 2003. I was running either FreeDOS or OpenDOS in it.
  • Xen - Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. A port of Linux 2.4 to run on the VMM works well, and *BSD and XP ports are in progress. Wed Jan 14 07:24:24 PST 2004. Update, Thu Nov 18 14:40:50 PST 2004: Xen has been running at least one version of *BSD for a while now. Fri Jan 28 12:40:23 PST 2005: A URL about setting up Xen on Fedora.
  • twoostwo runs on linux and windows, and can host linux, freebsd, windows, and perhaps others. It has a free 3 month evaluation.
  • Serenity Virtual worktation - Based on twoostwo
  • rHype - from IBM
  • Unfortunately, microsoft has purchased connectix. This may have a negative impact on some of the commercial products' ability to stay afloat financially.