Linux dual boot?

[Stephen]

What i personally envision for my desires is a dual boot system that
can run the non-active system in VM. so if i boot windows i can run my
Linux install in vm, or if o boot Linux i can run windows in VM.

It can be done i think but i haven't had it work out well yet... (that
whole flipping hardware about)

And ext and reiser fs's handle the weird disk load needed for OS/VM
allot better and Linux as a whole doesn't dink with the disk anywhere
near as much as windows. so if windows is your host this is my
personal suggestion if you have the budget for it. Ideally i would
love to se wine take such a hold that i can drop windows entirely, but
i think that is unlikely to happen. MS is developing their back-end
strongly and its to much for the wine team to really stay on top of
unless some of those API's are open sourced. but they may prove me
wrong yet.

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Eric Shubert <ejs at shubes.net> wrote:
> Stephen wrote:
>>
>> It can help with some performance issues to have your virtual drives
>> stored on a seperate physical drive from the OS especially in vmware
>> server on windows it can make your system crawl
>
> I can't speak of VMware Server on windows, but on CentOS this doesn't seem
> to be much of a problem. There are however various configuration settings
> that make a huge impact on performance. I've helped to write about these at
> http://wiki.qmailtoaster.com/index.php/VMware.
>
>> I do alot of weird vm things just to try them and there is a setting
>> that looks like you can map a virtual machine directly to a physical
>> storage device but I'm out of room to test this fully but it would be
>> immense to have a dual boot with vm abilities for you to access your
>> non dominant os
>
> I've used Raw Device Mapping, and it works nicely. While I haven't used it
> for the OS image, I don't know why that couldn't be done.
> See http://wiki.qmailtoaster.com/index.php/VMware#Raw_Device_Mapping
>
>> That's been my holy grail of vm/dual boot (just above accelerated
>> graphics in a vm)
>
> I'm not real clear what your objective is (what data you want to share
> between images), but having the data on a raw disk certainly makes it more
> manageable. If you need to access the data from multiple VMs concurrently,
> you can create a VM data server that provides nfs, samba and/or netatalk
> access to your data on the raw drive. This is what I've done. I have 2 raw
> disks that the VM data server uses in a raid-1 mirror as well. Sort of a VM
> backplane. ;)
>
> --
> -Eric 'shubes'
>
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-- 
A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.

Stephen