Boot Camp final - idea: dual booting without restart?

[Tinhead]

Just a random thought that popped into my mind in the shower this morning. I hope this hasn't been discussed ad infinitum previously.

Apple has stated that they are not going to add virtualization to Boot Camp. Dual-boot, it seems, is their direction - running Windows natively via restarting the computer.

Since all Macs now sport dual processors, is there really any reason why Boot Camp could not boot Windows *while* OS X was running? Practically dedicating one processor core for each OS simultaneously and running both OS' non-virtually.

Any thoughts?

 

[tyr2]

Unlikelly I would have thought. I don't think the hardware supports the kind of partitioning that would be required, not even in the Mac Pro.

On bigger Sun hardware you can setup 'domains'. These are logical partitions of the hardware, basically you dedicate system boards (cpu & ram) and interface boards (pci busses basically) to a domain. Once you're done you effectivly have 2 machines, you can boot them independently and run different Solaris releases on each one.

So if you wanted to do this on a Mac you'd need 2 separate CPUs (different sockets), 2 memory banks, 2 drives, 2 display cards etc...

Then again maybe they're working on some sort of hypervisor that could get it going.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I think, should Apple elect to do this, that it would be the perfect candidate for integrating with Spaces. One of the spaces would be your Windows environment. The problem is this: How do you handle the Intel Core Solo Macs out there?

 

[adrianblaine]

That is basically virtualization... It seems like if they were going to be running them at the same time without virtualization, one would be "asleep" while the other was running.

 

[compuwar]

Just a random thought that popped into my mind in the shower this morning. I hope this hasn't been discussed ad infinitum previously.

Apple has stated that they are not going to add virtualization to Boot Camp. Dual-boot, it seems, is their direction - running Windows natively via restarting the computer.

Since all Macs now sport dual processors, is there really any reason why Boot Camp could not boot Windows *while* OS X was running? Practically dedicating one processor core for each OS simultaneously and running both OS' non-virtually.

Any thoughts?

Everything other than the processor *isn't* dual, so you're sharing RAM and all the I/O- that won't work without some virtualization layer to deal with conflicts in access.

I'm glad that Apple isn't cannibalizing the 3rd party developers in the virtual software market at this point, even though it'd be interesting to see them buy Parallels. The price of Parallels or VMWare isn't so high that it's an impossible step for people, so I think the market's doing pretty well overall.