On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Jim Beard wrote: > On Wednesday, January 30, 2002, at 08:43 PM, Larry Price wrote:
> > one of those new imacs, though I'd be wanting to dual boot OS X & > > linuxppc > > or something along those lines. > > That's basically dual booting between a BSD and a Linux system, which > seems a little bit silly to me, although, if you were set on doing it, I > would recommend making a large Unix File System partition on the > machine, I'm sure both the darwin and the linuxppc systems could both > use it. True, now that BSD has the ELF compatibility layer, but the reasons I would want to have such a setup are more in the nature of a. a normal userland operating OS for mail, web browsing et al. b. a stripped down and well instrumented operating system image for debugging, profiling and optimizing task specific OS images that might involve things like different filesystems, and such. What can i say, I'm weird, I've got two different bootable kernels installed on my home workstation, and they both use the same /usr /var and /home one of them has the 2.2 series framebuffer patches with which I have been badly mangling my screen and the other is geared towards my usual day to day stuff. Lately though I've been getting really interested in this concept of running multiple Operating system images in userspace. What I'd be really keen on is some way to switch images on demand. That is, at system boot load OS a, a starts OS b and OS c running as processes. at some point later in time a hands over control to b (that is b is now treated as though it were in sole control of the hardware) b in turn loads a and c as userspace processes. and so forth... the applications for distributed computing and mobile code should be obvious. Although it would bring to the fore certain implications for the management of storage devices that would have difficult security issues.
