Parallel Booting XP & Linux (not dual-booting)

[JAB Creations]

I'm curious if any one or any company has attempted to "parallel boot" two operating systems. By that I mean instead of choosing an OS to actually load two operating systems without any virtualization. Obviously there are issues like collisions so such a system would have to split resources such as CPU cores and memory. Again for clarification I'm not talking about booting one OS, restarting the computer, and booting to another or using virtualization.

- John

[willybfriendly]

This [blogs.zdnet.com] is the closest I know of to what you are talking about.

I have never tired it and have no affiliation whatsoever...

[mcavic]

Not likely with a single motherboard. OS's don't know how to share resources with other OS's, which is why you need virtualization.

But there are setups where you run a lean host OS that provides virtualization for two or more guest OS's.

[swa66]

You can have virtualization without having a host OS. It's known as bare metal virtualization. That'll be as close as you can get. The hardware in your servers already has support for doing this effectively.

The virtualization software in that case makes it such that the resources are shared between the OSses. Just as yo noted that "fight" for rewources will have to be done somehow, somewhere.

Take a look at e.g. VMware ESX and WebmasterWorldare ESXi (both of these run on "bare metal" - no host OS involved).

[wheel]

I'm using virtualbox. Not a parallel boot, not a real virtualization I think. You actually install windows as an app inside linux - so no more virtualization issues. Or at least, fewer than the alternatives. When installed, you are running both windows and linux at the same time, almost natively.

[graeme_p]

@wheel, I thought that Virtualbox is virtualisation: everything I have read on it says so.

@JAB, what do you want to achieve? What can you not do with either virtualisation or Linux plus WINE?

[JAB Creations]

@graeme_p

One drive, one partition while retain XP for PC-gaming and adopting Linux for heavy-memory usage.

I have increasingly been using virtualization though Vista and 7 blow as production environments with two to five times the clicking to get the same amount of work done. However Wine does not run everything I need including games. I have a single system and I'd rather split resources (since 32 bit XP subtracts video RAM from system RAM thus giving the rest to Linux without it being emulated) and split the cores (two for each) since two cores works just fine for both gaming and production environments.

- John

[swa66]

Ah, if your dislike of virtualization is "too much clicking": you're looking for a higher integration on the desktop.

I've only experience with parallels (on mac): it has a feature called "coherence":
A windows copy running in a virtual machine can share one desktop with the host OS: you basically have mac and windows windows on the mac desktop, seamlessly integrated. No window with in it the windows OS, but the windows of the windows OS in between the mac windows. (In addition to the X windows integration which comes with the mac platform already (few if any use it)).

Parallels also exists for windows and linux, but I've never used it there, so it might or might not have "coherence" as a feature.

[wheel]

@wheel, I thought that Virtualbox is virtualisation: everything I have read on it says so.

You're probably right. I don't know the terminology. Some of the other solutions I've played with tried to emulate windows on linux. Virtualbox actually *is* windows installed as an app on linux.

[JAB Creations]

No, I said Vista & 7 require too much clicking, not virtualization. It's much easier to get a 64-bit copy of Vista/7 but impossible to get a 64-bit version of XP that by MS's terms will carry over from motherboard upgrades since they limited it to OEM copies only. I could get around such limitations if I really wanted to though it's clear MS doesn't care about design and usability any more hence why I want to retain XP while slowly adopting Linux.

- John

[graeme_p]

@wheel, yes, you got the terminology reversed. Running Windows on Linux is virtualisation, getting Linux to run Windows apps is providing a compatible API.

@JAB, I think virtualisation is the way to go.

That said, I would jump in one go. Try to pick a time when you are not too busy (if you are lucky enough to have those) and switch completely and solve all the problems at the start instead of dragging it out.

You might consider dual booting or virtualisation just for games. I mention dual booting because I do not know how much performance a virtual machine gets from the graphics hardware (near native or not). Perhaps Wheel has tried it under Virtualbox?

[JAB Creations]

@graeme_p

virtualization isn't going to work for me. For gaming I need XP to have direct access to hardware however it's X86 32 bit memory limitation (thanks Intel!) means I either have to purposely limit video memory to make more of the 4GB of my system memory available or have to split everything in to two separate computers.

Now if Wine could provide XP-like performance if Linux was the base OS that would be good (64 bit of course)...however in that situation I'm then faced with the aggravation of finding a Linux distro that is also a viable production environment. My mission-critical XP apps work fine with Wine however my big issue has been finding a file manager that is exactly like XP's Windows Explorer. Good design means the GUI is able to adapt to the user, never vice-versa.

- John

[yaix2]

That's not possible, if you look at the Assembler level. OS 1 will overwrite the stack and CPU registers that OS 2 is using and vice versa.

You need some sort of software layer to watch over who can write to what part of the stack and to save/restore the values inside the CPU registers when control goes from one OS to the other. As @swa66 says, bare metal virtualization. But that is still some sort of stripped down OS running the whole show.

[wheel]

Virtualbox works great but can be a bit slow. No way would I try to run intensive apps on Windows running inside virtualbox.

By the sounds of it, either a dual boot system or two seperate systems is the way to go. I've used both in the past and much prefer virtualbox - but I don't need speed or hardware access.

[kaled]

In order to parallel boot two or more operating systems, a virtualizing "boot loader" would have to start each operating system.

1. Virtualization results in loss of performance.
   
2. All operating systems would suffer equally.
   
3. There are no signficant benefits (that I can see) therefore...
   
4. No one is likely to write it.
   

With the current arrangement, one operating system gets to run at full speed. There are also windowing issues but these could probably be overcome if someone were to find a good reason to do it.

Kaled.

[graeme_p]

With the current arrangement, one operating system gets to run at full speed.

Good point. So, using Windows as the host OS might work. The other possibilities are Cedega or Crossover Games (performance must be reasonable as Cedega has been used by vendors for Mac ports). Has anyone used them? If not, I think wheel is right on dual booting or two PCs.

I have nothing to else add on gaming, as I have only started gaming much in the last few days!

There are a lot of file managers of Linux, there is bound to be one that suits you. What have you tried so far?

I like Dolphin, Konqueror, Thunar and Rox Filer. I have settled on Dolphin as as I like the UI, and everything just works, including remote file systems (although I suggest using a distro that has patched the add server dialogue to default to sftp rather than fish for ssh: Ubuntu and Mandriva (the latter within a few days of my reporting a bug*) have fixed that.

*a few days to get to the testing repo (which I enabled just for that), and about a week to get to the main repo.