On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Richard C. Steffens <[email protected]>wrote:
> wes wrote: > > Yes, you are correct about how this works. The only "gotcha" is that the > > hardware will not look the same to the virtualized installations. The > > virtualization software provides a "virtual processor" and "virtual RAM" > > and "virtual network interface" and every other piece of hardware you > might > > have. It has no concept of power management hardware. > > > > Does the power management hardware do its thing underneath, or does it > need to interact with the OS? I.e., if I get a motherboard and processor > that are good at minimizing power usage, but then run my day-to-day > stuff on a virtual machine, do I still get the benefit of the power > management? If not, is that a good reason to consider not going the > virtual route for day-to-day operation? > The OS can tell the power management hardware to do things like go to sleep, dim the screen, slow down the processor, etc. You wouldn't be able to test that sort of thing from within a VM. But if that isn't important, great. > > So, you can test things out from a software compatibility perspective, > but > > not so much for hardware. This means you'll about double your overall > > testing time. > > > > I.e., I'll have to re-test for different installations? That shouldn't > be too bad if I don't make changes very often -- which I don't. > I mean once you get all the software working the way you want, you'll then have to put it on real hardware, at which time you'll have to re-test with that hardware. > One reason to go route of different installations is that I can keep an > older copy of something working when the upgrade looses the ability to > talk to an older piece of hardware. I have an Epson Perfection 600 > flatbed scanner that worked fine when I was running SuSE 10.something. > But, when I installed Ubuntu Hardy, it was no longer recognized. I > figure if I keep a virtual distro around to run the scanner, I won't > have to worry too much about upgrading it. I wouldn't use it to talk to > the Internet in any way. > This seems reasonable. It might be fun to get communication between the device and the VM's OS going, but I'm sure with a little playing around, it should work. -wes _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
