Comment by simonh - Hacker Neue

simonh Sep 22, 2016 parent

You're not going to get full speed, but it depends on what you want to be fast. Graphics intensive activities are going to be constrained by the specifics of the design you go for. Apart from that the biggest constraint is memory since every GB allocated to one OS will by definition not be available to the others. However CPU support for virtualization is pretty good these days. Most of the i7 and i5 CPUs have built in instructions to make it pretty efficient for processor tasks.

Personally I have a 2014 5K iMac i7 with a fusion drive. I have a Fedora VM on it I run occasionally. I run it using Virtualbox which is a free virtualization system. I've allocated 4 GB of memory and it's very performant. It's a great way to try out virtualization at home and you can run Virtualbox on Linux, OSX or Windows as the host OS.

Keyframe Sep 22, 2016

Crap situation for me then since I need CPU, GPU, and RAM to the max for Video and 3D DCC apps.

Somehow, I thought there was this magical hypervisor that would give all to one OS that I could use and then, out of nowhere, I could switch to another OS in a way that first one would go to sleep and its memory put on hard drive and the other one would wake up its memory from hard drive and show up. I wouldn't need them running concurrently, but I would like to have them switch fast.

In a way I would like to consolidate three machines into one without having to run three machines or wait for shutdown/boot sequences (with multi boot).

Bonus would be to share disks (non boot ones) and copy and paste. That would be really great.

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