Martin Nix wrote:
I'll be cutting over to Xen (for some more hardcore virtualisation) sometime
in the next couple of weeks so will let you all know if it rocks or not
What's the virtualisation (eg Intel VT) support like on current laptop CPUs?
As I understand it, to get very far with Xen you really need that, but
it never crossed my mind that the functionality would be creeping into
laptops. You can check easily enough by looking at the flags in the
output from
cat /proc/cpuinfo
For the uninitiated, with Xen the virtual machine is much closer to
running on the real hardware than is always the case with VMWare and
similar products. This means either that the guest O/S has to support
virtualisation within the O/S itself and be prepared to effectively
multi-task with other operating systems (Linux can be built with this
support, but not an option with XP), or else the CPU needs additional
functionality to allow the multiple O/S's to share the CPU with each O/S
thinking it is the only O/S on the machine.
I think VMWare Server also supports this, and it should give better
performance than "bog standard" VMWare, but at the cost of requiring the
right CPU support and being a more fundamental change in the way things
work. I understand, but could be wrong, that one of the benefits of this
whole change is that the virtualised O/S sees the real hardware,
including graphics card? I'd appreciate confirmation or correction on that.
PS: useful info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization
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