> On Jan 28, 2021, at 7:11 PM, Lists <lists at benjamindsmith.com> wrote: > > My Dell Precision M3800 running Fedora works great but is really starting to > show its age, and I'm thinking about getting a new Mac M1-based laptop as it > would really be useful for Video production. > > But I really need to have a IA64 CentOS 7/8 VMs running locally for > development as I'm often on the road and flaky Internet makes it a necessity to > keep productivity up. I've been unable to officially confirm that VMWare/ > Parallels/VirtualBox intend to support IA64 based OS's and it *needs* to be an > exact (VM) copy of production so I can trial environments and builds prior to > roll out. > > Calling around, I actually got ahold of a sales staff at Parallels who assured > me (in broken India-accent English) that "of course all OS will supported when > the trial complete" but given that I wasn't sure that he really understood my > question I remain uncertain. > Take what I’ll say with a grain of salt. Virtualization solution became fast the moment “on the fly” conversion of guest system calls to host system calls was invented. The first I know of is Cygnus solutions who did it in their cygwin (company was bought by RedHat, and cygwin still exists and still is open source project). This all implies the system of the same architecture on guest system as is of the host system. Otherwise, one has to emulate different architecture CPU, which will make virtualization an order of magnitude slower. That (emulating generic CPU) was what VMware was doing originally. Then parallels desktop emerged and was (without mentioning it) using what Cygwin did. One can not know that about proprietary software, but give better guess than mine, please. And later VMware went same way, and became really fast virtualization solution too. Bottom line: guest and host systems should have the same architecture for guest system to be able to talk [semi-] directly to CPU for decently fast virtualization. So, the answer I would give: NO, one can not have guest system of different architecture as it is with decent speed. Just my $0.02 Valeri > Anybody here have any more information than I do? _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos