[ Thanks to Sean for this link.
]
“The technique the Netraverse folks are using is a rather
impressive one, and also different than what VMWare or Virtual PC
does. So, what they do really, is changing some system calls in the
kernel (hence the need for a custom Win4Lin kernel) and then they
are loading a DOS-alike environment in the form of a ‘server.’ When
you load Windows9x, Windows thinks that it runs on top of DOS and
not on top of Linux! Some specific drivers and services, like the
NIC driver, the graphics card driver, keyboard and mouse, I/O
operations etc, are not exactly emulated as VMware or VirtualPC do,
but instead they ‘pass through’ all of their requests to the
underlying server. Then, the server is making sure that these
calls/requests are executed by the real Linux hardware and
drivers.“It would be sufficient to say that Win4Lin is something between
WINE and VMWare. It loads a whole copy of Windows in a virtual
machine (like VMWare does), but it is utilizing its extended Linux
integration techniques to run, like WINE does. Someone would say
that Win4Lin is the best of both worlds and techniques…”