dual booting

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 10:53:33PM -0800, William Park wrote:
> Okey, I tried out 3 virtualizations, and here is my comments...
> 
> 1. VirtualBox -- Cleanest website.  You download "doc" (pdf or html), and
> ".run" binary.  After installing guest OS, you need to install "Guest Additions"
> within the guest OS, if you want better video/mouse support.  CentOS-5.4
> was too old as guest OS, and OpenSUSE-11.2 hangs on install.  Other than
> that, Slackware32/64, Fedora-12, Ubuntu-9.10, and Windows 2003/7 work
> okey.
> 
> 2. KVM -- Website and documentations were confusing.  But, it compiles and
> installs on Slackware, so it should work for other distro.  Since it doesn't have
> GUI frontend, you have to type command-line, which is not as bad as it sounds.
> However, KVM is too slow, so much so that it's useless in practice.

KVM is the fastest there is, unless you tried running it without the
hardware support (or module loaded) in which case it switches to qemu's
software emulation (which is very slow).

Check the start message to see that kvm support in kernel is actually
detected.  Recent kernels should come with kvm support already that
should work fine, older kernels need modules compiled.  For example I
have this:
ii  kvm-modules-2.6.26-2-amd64  85+dfsg-4+2.6.26-16  kvm modules for Linux (kernel 2.6.26-2-amd64).

2.6.26 is a bit old after all.

To check kvm support is working:
# kvm --help|head -n 1
QEMU PC emulator version 0.10.0 (kvm-85), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard

That means kvm userspace based on qemu 0.10.0 and KVM kernel module version 85.

Also:

# dmesg |grep kvm
[ 1759.219247] loaded kvm module (kvm-85)

When starting kvm it will tell you if it can't use kernel support,
in which case it will get very very slow.  If your cpu doesn't support
kvm, then kqemu is a decent option (should perform at least on par
with vmware).  Again make sure to compile the kqemu modules for your
kernel and load them or you drop back to software emulation of the cpu
again, and painful slowness.

> 3. VMware Player -- Most confusing and useless PR/bullshit website.  If I didn't
> know I wanted Player, I wouldn't know what to do or where to go.  Anyways,
> it fails to compile some kernel modules on my Slackware64-13.0 (2.6.32.2 kernel).
> I don't know, because VirtualBox and KVM compiled their modules without any
> problems.

VMware is hopeless.  Hasn't worked with new kernels in a while, and they
don't seem to care until redhat or suse goes to a new kernel.  Also their
new installer stinks.

> My recommendation is to try VirtualBox.  You need big monitors though, enough
> to accommodate multiple windows of 1024x768 minimum size.  If the VM is too
> small, you won't be able to reach OK/Cancel buttons. :-)
> 
> Next in my list is GPU programming.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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