Amiga Hypervisor

[Trev]

I've thought about it, but to do it properly on classic systems, I believe you'd need to use a combination of virtualization and emulation to maintain system timing. You'd replace the system-level bootstrap code with hypervisor code that bootstraps and starts Exec in a VM partition, presenting the user with the usual insert-disk animation. You could provide an early startup menu similar to the built-in one for managing VM partitions, storage, etc.

On newer PPC-based systems, you'd probably just want to use an off-the-shelf virtualization product (or a PS3) and write the OS4 startup code, kernel modules, and drivers necessary to support the virtual machine.

[Trev]

Different in the same way Bochs and DOSEMU are different from VMware and Virtual Server, although the utility on a 68k system is questionable. It would be a cool project, though.

EDIT: Quick and dirty baseline: Simple (and naive) harness that traps and ignores exceptions based on privileged instructions and MMU hits and wraps ISRs. You'd need enough of an MMU environment in place to remap ROM bits and virtualize MMU changes. After that, you just start testing and implementing new functionality as required. Custom chip access would probably have to be emluated to support two or more simultaneous processes that believe they "own" the hardware. (In that sense, it's UAE without the CPU emulation. How does UAE on 68k work today? Does it execute instructions unmodified or does run them in an emulator context?)

[Trev]

Not really. Amithlon emulates just like UAE. Under a virtual machine, unprivileged instructions and operations run unmodified on the host processor. The problem here is managing concurrent access to virtualized custom chips.