[CentOS] virtualization on the desktop a myth, or a reality?

[Lamar Owen]

On Thursday, March 03, 2011 01:20:06 pm Dr. Ed Morbius wrote:
> Compare against CIFS/Samba shares or NFS exports bewteen booted
> host/guests.  You get native filesystem support (under the host/guest as
> relevant), and mappings via CIFS/Samba and/or NFS/NIS+.
> 
> The win is still virtualization.

There are situations where dual-booting is a necessary thing to do; one of those is low-latency professional audio where accurate timekeeping is required; basically anything that needs the -rt preemptive kernel patches.  I actually have need of this, from multiple OS's, and while I've tried the 'run it in VMware' thing with Windows and professional audio applications the results were not satisfactory.

There are commercially developed and supported drivers for cross-platform uses put out by Paragon Software; ext[234]fs on Windows and OS X, HFS+ on Linux and Windows, and full NTFS (with lots of utilities) on OS X and Linux.

HFS+ would be the preferred filesystem to interchange with Mac OS X, but the in-kernel Linux drivers for HFS have issues; if it's for read-only it's not a problem, but the in-kernel driver is unsafe for anything like a heavy load, with filesystem corruption possible especially when deleting lots of small files.