Yes, I agree on the performance side. I think that the xen route is going to be painful but may well be worth in terms of payoff
Fedora 8 is choice based on personal pref, I've been with the project since FC3 and have had very few problems (apart from the obvious issues that people seem to get with certain graphics cards and wireless network adapters. YUM is pretty good now - like all distros (I suspect) if the repositories avaialable are sufficiently broad and well supported enough to stop people having to go down source compiled routes then the issues are reduced as a result, Fedora has this well covered through livna As far as I know on Vista this was a license wording rather than an OS enforcement - won't be a home version anyhow I expect the 3D graphics support to be one of the biggest challenges with this - watch this space Martin -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark Rogers Sent: 09 April 2008 12:57 To: Peterborough LUG - No commercial posts Subject: Re: [Peterboro] Linux Laptops Martin Nix wrote: > Vmware server seems to run XP at about 50% of native performance > (rough visual estimate) - this is if the VM support flags are on or > off in the BIOS, so not sure if Vmware is really taking good advantage of this. > It obviously depends a lot on what it is doing. I have found in the past that installing a decent graphics driver into a normal PC can make a big difference, and with a VM you don't have that option (yes I know there is a driver, it's just not in the same class as 3d drivers for current cards because the emulated card itself is not up to that much). For other stuff where the GUI isn't important I've often found near-native performance is there's nothing else going on with the host (albeit that not much in XP doesn't need the GUI). > From what I have seen the virtualisation support is pretty much the > same across the VM products, this is the first system where I would > say I'm close to it being usable but I know there is unlocked > potential there - hence the Xen experiment > I'm very interested to know how you get on (laptop or not). I'd like to go down this route with my home desktop (I chose the CPU specifically for VT support), but I've never got far with Xen (I did try playing some time ago, way before Xen 3, and got into a muddle with a mixture of conflicting HowTos and a lack of fundamental knowledge). > I'm intending to virtualise under Fedora 8 (base install) as the host > OS and then as Guest the following Virtual machines : > Is F8 a choice because of the virtualisation, or just your preferred distro anyway? Had mixed experience with Fedora (mostly I just hate yum) but ought to give it another spin. > 4) Windoze Vista - just to see what it is like (and then have the > intense satisfaction of deleting it when I find out how bad it really > is) > Just FYI: Vista used to have a licence which prevented its use in virtual machines (at least in home versions) but that's now been lifted. > Here is the cpuinfo (it's a 2.5GHz not 2.4 as I said before), the > important bit for virtualisation (I believe) is the vmx flag which is > apparent > Indeed, vmx is the important bit. I note you have your CPUs running at 800MHz which is better than I get out my crusty old Athlon (they only go down to 1000MHz as it stands) but I have no idea if that's something I can tune? > VMWare server doesn't give you any closer binding to the hardware but > XEN does as it is a custom kernel - I emphasize that this is an > experiment that may go horribly wrong. That's what makes life so much fun! I'm very keen to see how it handles hardware support. My understanding is that this is down to the hypervisor (in your case F8) to choose, and obviously if you want to show three operating systems running in windows on your desktop then you have to virtualise the graphics somewhere, but it ought to be possible to get proper 3D performance from a non-windowed but still virtual O/S. Assuming you want each VM to have its own network connectivity they can't "share" that hardware either, and similar problems occur with USB and other devices. So I'm sure its more complicated than it sounds. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
