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Bringing the Entire VMware Server Down from Within a Virtual Machine in Three Easy Steps

1. Install a virtual sound device
2. Boot the VM
3. Write to the OPL3 registers within the VM

I'm not sure what the exact hell is going on here, but the VM instantly halts, hangs for a second, silently pitches a fatal error, politely self-terminates, and then the whole damn server crashes (after the apparent clean bail-out from the VM!), taking everybody else's virtual machine with it. Quality.

As far as I can tell, the problem is that there is actually nonworking partly-implemented OPL3 emulation in there — the IO is there, but doing anything with it is a one-way ticket to Undefined Behavior Land. Some kind of internal exception happens, a controlled self-termination of the VM takes place, and then — here I'm guessing a whole bunch — the process of cleaning up the environment and freeing resources allocated by the virtual hardware devices encounters a bit of Grotesquely Unexpected State, resulting in a good old-fashioned lol-languages-with-manual-memory-management-style Ogólny Błąd Ochrony. I need to take a debugger to it to figure out what exactly is going on, of course.

Does VMware have virtual blue smoke implemented yet?

tl;dr: NO CANYON.MID FOR YOU

(no subject)

LJ boycott is for kids

YouTube doesn't seem to think so, though, and refuses to actually post anything here when I click the "share" dealio, so let's do it this way.

(super quality)

Presented as a Curiosity for those who Existed in the 1990s, a brief overview of a default Windows 3.11 installation (plus the SoundBlaster 16 goodies, of course — how else was I supposed to play Birdhouse in Your Soul on the OPL3 in the background?)

A spectacle of graphics and sound

This is running in a hacked version of DOSBox 0.72, by the way — VMware is a piece of trash which would unceremoniously puke every time something tried to write to certain sound or video control registers which Windows 3.1 wanted to touch approximately once a tick, and DOSBox needed its dynamic recompilation majorly tweaked and its OPL3 emulation fixed up a bit (NONLINEAR MULTIPLICATIONNNNNN), so I patched it haphazardly.