they don't need BT, but rather, you can't let the VM manage its own PTEs. virtualbox lets you configure that - just turn off nested paging. vmware unfortunately doesn't do that. if you can get the VM booting in safe mode, flipping the safety options from system properties perf button might help too. (I will say ME runs fine where 98 doesn't. weird!)
userbinator|4 years ago
The background information for that reason is contained in these two detailed articles:
https://blog.stuffedcow.net/2015/08/pagewalk-coherence/
https://blog.stuffedcow.net/2015/08/win9x-tlb-invalidation-b...
tl;dr: newer AMD processors have non-coherent pagewalks. Intel has maintained coherent pagewalks despite that not being explicitly guaranteed in their documentation. Win9x depends on that.
I will say ME runs fine where 98 doesn't. weird!
Caching/speculative execution related bugs are very sensitive to patterns of memory access.
wila|4 years ago
It would be nice if Win98 works for everyone still.
wila|4 years ago