4.3 Minimal driver

An emulator usually emulates some very basic and commonly used hardware for hard disk controllers, sound cards and network controllers. In other words, from the perspective of the guest OS, it sees a SB16 (Sound Blaster 16-bit) sound card, a NE2000 NIC (network interface card) and a regular VGA card. However, all of these ``devices'' are emulated. Any operation on these emulated devices translate to resource utilization of the actual hardware controlled by the host OS.

What does this mean? It means that most Linux distributions do not have any problem getting installed, regardless of the actual hardware configuration of the machine itself. Furthermore, it also means that the guest OS behave exactly the same whether it is run on machine ``A'' or machine ``B'', even though the actual hardware of machine ``A'' and machine ``B'' can be completely different.

One of the trouble you may encounter is when you want a hardware device to be exposed to the guest OS. For example, let's say you have a Bluetooth to USB adaptor, and want the guest OS to see it. This is possible with only some emulators. QEMU, for example, does not support USB pass-through with a Windows host (this feature is supported with a Linux host).