OT: notebook shopping

[Ted Gould]

On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 16:03 -0700, Vaughn Treude wrote:
> Ted Gould wrote:
> > On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 13:05 -0700, Vaughn Treude wrote:
> >> I plan to make it dual-boot, because it would be useful to have Windoze 
> >> available so I can run Visual Studio. I detest Vista, so this means the 
> >> notebook should have XP as an available option. (If it's super-cheap, it 
> >> _might_ be worth buying an XP CD and blasting away Vista, but I'd like 
> >> to avoid this if possible.)
> > 
> > With the new Ubuntu Hardy it is including the KVM virtualization
> > manager; I've been using it to run all kinds of OSes on top of Linux.
> > I'd recommend this over dual booting today.  It is very, very slick.  No
> > accelerated video, but it doesn't sound like that's what you need.
> > (definitely not what I need)
> 
> It's been ages since I've played with virtualization. At the time, there 
> was a very painful performance hit. I agree, it would be the way to go 
> if you were running, for example, MS Office or Visio or QuickBooks or 
> something like that. My major concern now is, will Visual Studio work 
> with it? For development you want the system to work _exactly_ like the 
> native boot.

With KVM virtualization has changed alot.  If you have a CPU that
supports it (you're buying a new laptop, you will) what basically
happens is the CPU traps the instructions and lets the host OS run those
instructions.  So then the host OS can reroute things like memory access
and such.  The guest OS runs on the CPU directly so it is very fast.

As far as development is concerned, it should be largely the same.  The
only thing that is different is the hardware that is emulated like the
hard drive comes up as the "QEMU" brand.  But, if you're not doing
anything bare metal (application software, the like) you shouldn't see
any difference between a KVM solution and a native execution of the OS.

		--Ted