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

Thu Mar 3 21:24:14 UTC 2011
Dr. Ed Morbius <dredmorbius at gmail.com>

on 15:37 Thu 03 Mar, Lamar Owen (lowen at pari.edu) wrote:
> 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

I think I addressed that reality.  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).

> 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.

What surprises me is that there aren't more systems available which
provide separate bare-metal computing environments within a single
enclosure, perhaps with some form of shared storage, perhaps just
integrated networking, to provide this sort of need.  We see this in
server space (blade and multi-system enclosures) but rarely if ever in
consumer space.

Otherwise, the solution would be to run the system with the low-latency
requirements as the host.
 
-- 
Dr. Ed Morbius, Chief Scientist /            |
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