What's the Deal with Virtual Computing?

[AFTT47]

As I understand it, a computer can divide its hardware resources among operating systems. Is this practical for use for running Linux for general purposes and Windows for gaming without resorting to dual-booting?

[Tiberius]

As I understand it, a computer can divide its hardware resources among operating systems.

Essentially, yes. Although all the work is done by a hypervisor running on a host operating system, and that host operating system will have access to the raw hardware resources, whilst the virtual operating systems (called virtual machines) will only have access to "virtual" resources that are managed by the hypervisor. On a computer which has 8GB of physical RAM for instance, you could run a hypervisor which divides that RAM amongst a number of virtual machines, but the host OS also has to have some RAM to run too.

Is this practical for use for running Linux for general purposes and Windows for gaming without resorting to dual-booting?

Kinda, it really depends on what you are doing. If you want to run multiple servers, then virtualization is a big win, as servers tend not to need graphical resources. Graphics is the main problem you'll run into when using VMs. You can run pretty much any operating system in a VM, though if you are wanting to get that VM to use a graphics card, you are going to run into problems, as the GPU is already used by the host OS and most hypervisors won't implement a virtual GPU.

So if you run Linux as your main OS, and have a Windows VM running in some hypervisor (like VirtualBox), you won't be able to play games on the Windows VM which require access to the GPU. In that case, it's better to dual boot. If you have the opposite setup (i.e. Windows is your main OS, and you are running Linux VMs) then you can use the native Windows OS to run the games and the hypervisor (but your Linux VMs won't have access to the GPU).


It looks like NVIDIA at least have a solution to the problem, though I expect it only works on certain GPUs: http://www.nvidia.com/object/dedicated-gpus.html

[AFTT47]

Thank you, Tiberious. It sounds like there is no perfect solution. I am not locked into a single hardware solution so it sounds like I should use different hardware platforms for different purposes.

[bennyboy]

Thank you, Tiberious. It sounds like there is no perfect solution. I am not locked into a single hardware solution so it sounds like I should use different hardware platforms for different purposes.

Why?

There's no problem with a good computer running two operating systems at one time, unless you need to do intensive data processing, like rendering videos or playing PC games.