Enabling Virtual Machine support

[Bill McGonigle]

On 09/28/2009 09:58 AM, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> I was hoping to get myself a laptop where I could simply try VMMs
> without having to cross-check my cpuflags against the hardware
> requirements of each VMM.

The Macbook lines are pretty good in this respect.  My about-to-be-sold
2006 MBP has been doing hw-virt for a couple years.  One of the
situations where the "yes, but they use better components" argument is
actually true.  Fedora 11 broke EFI-compatible installs, F12 may get it
back if it's feature complete by yesterday (didn't check).

KVM is pretty nice if you have the hardware - on a Core2Quad with the
Redhat VirtIO drivers, Vista is pretty usable:

http://blog.bfccomputing.com/articles/2009/09/14/converting-a-windows-vista-kvm-virtual-machine-to-redhat-virtio-drivers

But 'small' things like sound, live snapshots, etc. are still very
missing.  Xen PV is good for all-free solutions but is just now catching
up with kernels that aren't 3-years old, non-KVM-Qemu is slow,
VirtualBox is nice, and I agree, VMWare Server 2 is a total turkey (I've
used it forever, and switched to KVM because of v2).

-Bill

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Bill McGonigle, Owner
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