on 16:44 Thu 03 Mar, Lamar Owen (lowen@pari.edu) wrote:
On Thursday, March 03, 2011 04:24:14 pm Dr. Ed Morbius wrote:
I think I addressed that reality.
Part of it, yes.
For some needs, you need to be on bare metal, though whether this is accomplished via multi-booting or multiple systems (if you're doing professional music editing, presumably you can justify a dedicated system to that task).
It's not the computer portion of a separate dedicated system that would be expensive; it's the audio interfaces, patching, and control surfaces. Much much much easier to dual-boot in a workflow-friendly fashion. It would be decidedly nice to have virtualization running well enough to handle all the needs; but it requires twice the capacity machine to do it.
I thought a bit about that when posting earlier. I still disagree WRT dual-booting. And no, virtualization doesn't need twice the hardware by a long shot (aggregated load averaging, shared componentry, and a host of other savings).
Audio's pretty easy, as you could select between sources and output (or input) accordingly.
Ditto inputs (keyboard, mouse, etc.). Storage might be virtualized/aggregated somehow.
For video, you want high-performance. I'm thinking an integrated KVM might work, or something like it. If done in hardware with digital inputs it should be pretty good. How you'd split / select displays would be a design question.