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Virtualization & The Future of Operating Systems

  • 20-01-2010 5:39pm
    #1
    ve
    Closed Accounts Posts: 448 ✭✭


    At present a lot of us have a pretty good idea about what we need from a computing platform at home. E.g. some play games, others just browse the web, others do some specific tasks, etc. That knowledge of "what we do" then feeds in to "what we need" from a computer in terms of hardware performance and subsequent hardware specs.

    I for example like toying with various operating systems, but at the same time I like the idea of utilizing lots of different hardware by the operating systems I use. We all know that lack of driver support by hardware vendors for Linux has been a significant problem for the growth of Linux in the home/desktop market. It's been a catch22 situation in fact, to make matters worse, but thankfully it's gotten to a stage that I rarely use windows any more at all and am very happy with Linux, but I don't have everything I would want, yet!...

    In my travels over the years I started using Virtualization, VMWare/VirtualBox/etc and fell in love with the idea of hardware/platform abstraction and dynamic physical resource allocation via a host OS to guest platforms. But this has got me thinking...

    Years ago I built a PC that had a beefy ATI graphics card, which worked flawlessly in Windows but when I tried that baby to work properly on Linux I was met with much headaches. In the end I swapped it out for a NVidia card purely because of the better driver support available for Linux and off I went with my desktop effects and ability to play the odd game with a decent frame rate. While using Linux as my OS of choice these days I am constantly forced to research compatible hardware prior to making any purchases, a problem that we rarely have to give a thought to while running Windows. It's not as problematic as it once was by any means, but it's still a concern. However I come from a technical background and have the ability to do this, most end users don't even know where to start or aren't even aware of the concern in some cases.

    So then I was thinking, in an era of virtualization why are we still installing host operating systems directly on PC hardware. Instead would it not make more sense if we could boot our PCs straight in to a Virtual Machine platform which then loaded our guest operating system(s) of choice. So instead of a hardware vendors writing drivers for Windows, etc they write drivers for the Virtual Machines. Then we can start using whatever platform we want without worrying if we will be able to utilize the underlying hardware resources.

    E.g when you power on your PC at home, it would do it's usual BIOS(POST) checks then the VM would bootstrap itself like any host OS does today. Then against a user definable configuration automatically boot your default guest OS or else give you a boot option like any contemporary bootloader does for dual/tri/etc configurations today. Yes I appreciate that we will lose some resources to the VM well before the guest even starts, but surely that's better than Host OS below VM below Guest OS. If we create a hyper resource efficient VM container that managed hardware resources made available to guest platforms that would be excellent. It would fare much better as an open source project also, because we would just end up back at square one if we had Microsoft releasing commercial level zero VMs. What we really need as end users is choice in terms of the platforms we use. The hardware vendors need to target highest populated market for their hardware in terms of driver development. I think this idea would be on the road of a technical compromise.

    I know this is relatively far fetched from what we do today on home PCs, but I thought that it could be the one technological change that would really start giving people at home a choice regarding which platform they wanted to use as opposed to being forced to stay with just Windows because of the hassle associated with stack incompatibilities elsewhere.

    What do you think?


Comments

  • #2
    marco_polo
    Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 10,087 Mod ✭✭✭✭marco_polo


    ve wrote: »

    What do you think?

    That windows would clear out the VM boot partition and install itself over the Virtual Machine platform :pac:


  • #3
    ve
    Closed Accounts Posts: 448 ✭✭ve


    :D - well of course, but that fact aside....Windows (incl. 7) doesn't give me any trouble from the another partition on this machine that is so very rarely accessed these days....which is nice ;)

    Also I'm not saying that the above is straight forward, its a very rough idea. What services are part of the VM and what is left to the guest OS could be a sore spot.


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