Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

See http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcxddbtr_23cg5thdfj for photo credits.

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

VirtualBoxen

Gave in, worn down... Installed VirtualBox, and Ubuntu in a virtual box, on my tablet PC running Windows 7.

Stream of  consciousness...

3 comments:

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

VB Seamless Windows mode only works on the primary Windows display. Now, let's see, I have 4 displays attached to my puny laptop...

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

By the way, also started using Microsoft Virtual PC on the same laptop.

Mainly to get Windows XP mode. Which is a Windows guest that I know I am licensed to.

(Really, I want to install a Windows 7 guest. But I don't have install media and am unclear on licensing: can I use the same license both as host and guest on the same physical machine?)

Would like to use Virtual PC and Virtual Box at the same time.

... It seems that if I start up Virtual PC while Virtual Box is running, then Virtual Box gets a "Guru Meditation" critical error.

I.e. it doesn't look as if I can run both of these different virtual machine managers at the same time.

...

Unsurprising, if they are competing for the same hardware VMX and VT-d support.

TBD: if I disable hardware VMX acceleration, can they coexist?

...

People have often asked me why I am so much an advocate of user level virtual machines, as opposed to hypervisors.

(Note: I want to say Type 1 (native, bare metal) versus Type 2 (hosted) hypervisors - but that's not quite right.

well, here's an example: I have two nice bits of software, each convenient to a different VMM.

Perhaps I can get Ubuntu to run under Virtual PC. Perhaps. But I have them both running in their respective VMMs *now*.

It sucks that the VMMs fight.

We have already shown that user level virtual machine managers can run. And, for that matter, coexist. Even while using the same hardware acceleration, aka VMX mode. Possibly not system level I/O acceleration, VT=d.. But VNX, nested page tables - that SHOULD be doable.

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

Here's one reason why I find virtual machines a hassle: disk space. Resource fragmentation. I'm quickly running out of disk space as I configure two guests to run on top of my host.