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Sometime later this fall (northern hemisphere) I hope to re-create my system: Upgrade from Waldorf to Bunsen, set up RAID and so on.
After some playing around with Bunsen and CAELinux on virtual machines I am leaning towards setting up my new system with more RAM and run alternative operating systems in virtual machines rather than dual- or multi-booting.
Does this sound like the right thing to do or am I missing something?
So far I only have experience of Virtualbox.
/Martin
"Problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back."
Piet Hein
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There is also a (catastrophically) slow io performance when accessing hosts filesystem (At one point I had an idea to do a video/audio transcoding vm, but the speed measurements did stop that).
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Just do it the way you want it. Bunsen with Debian stable as base and then distro hopping in vb sounds like a good and safe idea to me. Like eating a neverending cake
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Like eating a neverending cake
Oh I like that idea.
Regarding the performance issues mentioned by nobody and bronto, I have never had any problems related to this in my Vbox systems. It may be that I simply never used these in such a way as to cause such problems to be noticable. If you are just testing out distros I'd say your plan to add more RAM and go for it is just fine. Vbox can be RAM hungry.
I have been doing most of my distro hopping this way for several years now and it works for me. Compositing has worked fine on nearly every system and data transfer between guest and host seems to work well enough. I guess it really comes down to your usage senario.
“The university is well structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off...." Mario Savio
"Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse". Help enforce our right to free and anonymous speech by running a Tor relay.
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There is a remedy called VirtIO which allows disk I/O at near-native performance, same for VirtIO virtual network cards. I'm using it in qemu+kvm for a Windows VM (support is available for both Linux and Windows guest OSs), and it works really well. Just as you are saying: It makes for a really big improvement in performance.
Good to know (If I ever fell into qemu waters).
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More RAM is a plus as have been said here. What are your purpose with this? Distro hopping for fun, or are there some serious work involved? Things tend to be a little it slower in vb, that is my experience at the least.
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Your installed guest operating systems will never really approach the performance you'd get booting them direct off the hardware, but feed them enough RAM on a suitably fast machine and it can be an acceptable trade off, it's massively more convenient to run multiple operating systems as virtual machines, as outlined, it depends a lot on your use pattern how well the trade off works for you.
The ability to revert major changes (undo {m}uck-ups) and try a different approach is sometimes a real plus.
I've often found that moving big chunks of data between host & guest can be faster over the network as though they were separate physical machines than using the built in transfer methods, at least with a gigabit NIC.
Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed...
If there's an obscure or silly way to break it, but you don't know what.. Just ask me
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On my main machine i have 5 partitions. One for my primary OS, three for distrohopping and a big one for datastorage. I also have a vbox environment for testing out all kinds of OS/Distros (not only linux but also AndroidX86 and the BSDs). The ones i have the best expierience with get a go on partition 2,3 or 4. So for me it is a combo of multiboot and virtual machines.
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Your installed guest operating systems will never really approach the performance you'd get booting them direct off the hardware, but feed them enough RAM on a suitably fast machine and it can be an acceptable trade off
Never say never. You need a capable machine to run VMs in their full glory. With adequate hardware you won't notice any difference in performance compared to a metal install. I got my system with an 8 cores CPU and 16 Gigs of RAM just with VirtualBox (and audio editing) in mind. I always use 4 GB RAM and at least two cores for any VM, plus 128 MB VRAM beacuse it's the maximum allowed. I would assingn more if posible. I don't use my secondary (old Quadro) GPU anymore because is annoyingly noisy, but I have in mind to get a fanless GPU exclusive for the VMs. Anyway, as bronto pointed out, transfering data between the host and guests, or guest to guest, is not very fast though bearable if not needing huge transfers. I stopped uing shared folders or anything samba a while ago. I use ssh instead.
I am leaning towards setting up my new system with more RAM and run alternative operating systems in virtual machines rather than dual- or multi-booting.
I use to have an awful lot of metal installs. I now just keep three, an they are already too many. But I use to have (depending on the day) from 20 to 35 virtual machines ready to go for different purposes, from plain fun and toying, to dedicated packaging VMs. Virtualization fully changed and simplified my hopping workflow.
Vbox can be RAM hungry.
Not my experience. You can make your guests as resources hungry as you want, But virtualbox itself, Not really.
Last edited by Snap (2015-10-16 09:07:24)
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brontosaurusrex wrote:There is also a (catastrophically) slow io performance when accessing hosts filesystem (At one point I had an idea to do a video/audio transcoding vm, but the speed measurements did stop that).
There is a remedy called VirtIO which allows disk I/O at near-native performance, same for VirtIO virtual network cards. I'm using it in qemu+kvm for a Windows VM (support is available for both Linux and Windows guest OSs), and it works really well. Just as you are saying: It makes for a really big improvement in performance.
Never heard of it. Thanks, nobody. Out to the webs searching for info.
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Thanks guys, great response and discussion.
So far I have not had any issues with graphic performance. On the contrary, I have been impressed. Yes, you are right, I am not into gaming.
Shared folders has both worked OK and less OK for me. The less good experience has been with one particular application under WXP. Otherwise mostly OK. Disclaimer: I don't use it a lot and certainly don't push its envelope.
The heaviest use in the future may be some humble and occasional engineering number crunching in CAELinux.
/Martin
"Problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back."
Piet Hein
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Vbox can be RAM hungry.
Not my experience. You can make your guests as resources hungry as you want, But virtualbox itself, Not really.
To be clear, I meant that running an entire OS inside Vbox is much more resource intensive than just running something like a web browser or other ordinary app. Having extra RAM is certainly a good idea if one is going to play around with this.
As a somewhat more extreme, and admittedly unusual example, I recently had one of my Sid builds cause Vbox to use over 4 Gigs of ram even though the guest Sid system itself was only using a bit over 200 Megs.
“The university is well structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off...." Mario Savio
"Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse". Help enforce our right to free and anonymous speech by running a Tor relay.
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Really? ATM I'm running vsido on a VM (97 MB @idle). It takes about 1GB overall. Way less than your 4GB. No idea what makes this difference whatsoever.
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@Snap I have no idea either. It was just this one build. (Sid with Xfce) It was consistent and did the same thing after rebooting.
The others I had going at the time used much less. (Sid with Cinnamon and LXDE)
I never got around to figuring it out because I stopped playing around with these builds after I installed Hydrogen-Sid to metal. That's part of the beauty of using virtualisation. If something doesn't work right, delete it and try something else. When you find something you like, give it a good thrashing, and if it passes that test, install to metal.
“The university is well structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off...." Mario Savio
"Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse". Help enforce our right to free and anonymous speech by running a Tor relay.
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Yep, that's the good part of it. You can test several distros to find out what they have to offer, borrow configs, test settings and tweaks before doing them (borking) your metals, and also important, compiling or building packages in VMs instead bothering your (supposedly) pristine and clean metal systems with the building dependencies and all the extra stuff needed for the task.
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nobody wrote:brontosaurusrex wrote:There is also a (catastrophically) slow io performance when accessing hosts filesystem (At one point I had an idea to do a video/audio transcoding vm, but the speed measurements did stop that).
There is a remedy called VirtIO which allows disk I/O at near-native performance, same for VirtIO virtual network cards. I'm using it in qemu+kvm for a Windows VM (support is available for both Linux and Windows guest OSs), and it works really well. Just as you are saying: It makes for a really big improvement in performance.
Never heard of it. Thanks, nobody. Out to the webs searching for info.
Anything good for IO speed to expect from virtualbox 5 para-virtualisation?
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I use virtualbox for all of my live-build's and os testing as this is much more flexible than dual or triple booting. It also allow me to teleport running vm's between different vm host on my network.
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch07.html#teleporting
I agree with the comments above that more ram is preferred, I have 32gb + ssd + i7 in my main box and can easily have 6 vm's running at the same time on.
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I never passed from 3 VMs running at once... yet. LOL. But RAM usage (I have 16 GB) seems to allow even more.
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Just another 2 cents ( and not even really worth that.) Both approaches have the pros/cons. Sheesh it's really up to you. Personally although think hypervisors are friggin miraculous n interesting things.
Still believe there's no substitute for actual install to hdd. Though can see where both have a definite place. So hmmm ... guess mark me down as undecided. VM's all managed in one place, easy to clone in a few clicks, safe to conduct much you might not want to do with an actual install.
Though hades, you can backup and restore an actual install easy enough with gnu/nix too. Just saying for Nix installs that I really like I want to see em in all their native n true, bare metal nixy glory. Rather than having a hypervisor involved. Am nowhere near proficient with any of the hypervisors regardless. You may be more savvy.
For me still want actual install for main gnu/nix OS's and not willing to accept a substitute. Even setting up a gnu/nix host tweaked to hell n gone for the purpose, still wouldn't feel was getting the real deal and that's unacceptable to me. Dang ... it, it's nix, decide what's right for you and/or do both.
Vll!
Last edited by BLizgreat! (2015-10-25 02:19:00)
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And you save hardware too. I only have (and want to have) a single computer. Virtualization is a blessing in that subject.
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