[ale] [OT] - system crapped out

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 12/06/2012 05:10 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> Was looking at that but snag is a parallel port dongle. Kvm doesn't
> (qemu precisely ) not sure of others.
> Old DOS app (runs under freedos) requires blasted dongle. Freedos
> doesn't like it either.

Assuming that your motherboard has sufficient features to support this, 
KVM can do PCI passthrough.  You can install a PCI multi-I/O card and 
assign it to the virtual machine, which can then talk directly to the 
hardware.

This means that you can literally give the virtual guest system the 
access it needs to real hardware so that it can validate the dongle or 
whatever.  However, I'd strongly consider seeing if the dongle can be 
replaced.  I highly doubt the dongle is secure by modern standards, and 
it can probably be emulated in software if you have the ability to 
figure out what is being sent/received by the software.

But, PCI passthrough would help you here.

	--- Mike