Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

An alternative to Duel Boot

(1/5) > >>

steeladept:
I was just thinking, with all the great software out there for virtualization of everything, duel booting computers, and other similar technologies; has anyone heard of, or had experience with a software KVM?  What I am envisioning is one machine with two hard drives.  Each hard drive has it's own OS and software on it, but it is each independently supported on the same hardware.  It would likely require some sort of BIOS support for hotkey switching, so I am not sure it exists, but I thought I would throw it out there to see if anyone has heard or seen anything like this.

hollowlife1987:
Not sure if this is what your looking for but its pretty close,

Virtual Server 2005


Allows you to run multiple server os's from one machine that is my understanding of it anyways.
There is a linux program that does the same thing but i cant remember the name of it right now.

asfd:
try KVM... its part of linux kernel and allows exactly what you want.

hollowlife1987:
Upon reading of KVM you need a newer CPU that natively supports virtualization.

http://aplawrence.com/Linux/kvm_virtualization.html

f0dder:
It really depends on what you want to do. Virtualization is great, but it's still not as fast as running native (especially if you need accelerated graphics - forget playing 3D games). Also, hardware virtualization in current x86 processors can actually run slower than software-only virtualization.

If you stick with dual-booting, just about any BIOS released within the last 5 years or more will have a boot-time hotkey for choosing your boot device. Some aren't all that great, but most I've seen will let you choose between individual harddrives. Granted, this does require a reboot, but then everything's running at native speeds.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page