The October, 2007 PLUG meeting is on Thursday October 18, at 7:30 pm. In room 3M67 at the University of Winnipeg. On the agenda, (1) round table discussion (2) QEMU, a free software machine emulator and virtualizer.

PLUG member Mark Jenkins will provide the presentation. Potential features of QEMU for demonstration include:

• serial port emulation
• network emulation
• the kqemu module and the difference between virtualization and emulation
• free software operating systems other than GNU/Linux that you can run on this.

From the QEMU website:
“When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performances.”

“When used as a virtualizer, QEMU achieves near native performances by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. A host driver called the QEMU accelerator (also known as KQEMU) is needed in this case. The visualizer mode requires that both the host and guest machine use x86 compatible processors. ”

Location is the University of Winnipeg's main campus on Portage avenue (between Spence and Balmoral), room 3M67 (a class room), third floor of the Manitoba building.

The easiest way to get there is to enter the main (south) doors of Centennial Hall (the big building at the center of the campus). Go up the escalators two levels, proceed forward on the second floor of Centennial Hall, look for the signs on the right directing your towards Manitoba Hall, make a right turn and pass through a hallway into Manitoba Hall. A left turn is the direction to take at Manitoba Hall's hallway, and room 3M67 is a few doors down, on the right side.

The heightened security and bag searches that the university was conducting at the end of September are no longer taking place.