"Garry Hamilton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I would imagine that the new OS context would
> have to mount the drive volumes and assess the
> state of certain hardware, yes? [...]

Memory and the CPU in general are issues. If you leave it up to each OS to
"share", then you get into situations like one not releasing access in a
timely manner. Something needs to run the show, arbitrating access to shared
resources. VMware has done as close a job of doing this as I've seen,
allowing each OS to run in an independent "sandbox" wherein it think it has
exclusive control of the hardware. Even then, an OS that doesn't play well
with things like idle loop processing (DOS, NetWare) still drive up CPU
utilization without some help. Within each virtual machine, you can do
pretty much anything you could on a physical system, but you are limited to
a specific set of emulated hardware.

If the underlying goal is to avoid lengthy boot times, I don't see a
workable way of booting one, then "flipping" to the other easily -- at least
not now.

- Bob

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