[Tuxaloosa] hardware virtualization

[Beddingfield, Allen]

Enabling that in the bios turns on access to the AMD-V (or Intel VT-x on Intel systems).  This will give you much better performance on your VMs, but is only to do with the CPU.  VMware or VirtualBox (or XEN for that matter) will make use of this.  I would go with Virtualbox.  The performance of the VMware server in video, etc...is horrible.  The for-pay VMware workstation is better, but it takes some extra tinkering to get it to work on Slackware the last time I went that route.  Virtualbox is what I use to virtualize Windows on top of Linux on my workstation at work and have had good luck with it.  I have not tried the latest build, though.  I think it is supposed to have improved video support, but I'm not sure about that.  I know that it does support AMD's virtualization very well, but I have had very unpredictable results with their support on Intel CPUs.  Sometimes that works...sometimes it doesn't...sometimes it brings down the host OS in the crash...  Shouldn't be a problem for you with AMD CPUs, though.  When you create a VM, you will have to manually force it to use AMD-V, otherwise it will not by default.
Either way, you are going to be emulating some old video hardware - not accessing the onboard hardware directly, so I doubt it will be up to handling Adobe apps.  Your best bet will probably be to try getting that going under Crossover.

Hope this helps...

Allen B.

-----Original Message-----
From: tuxaloosa-bounces at tuxaloosa.org on behalf of E Hanson
Sent: Sat 12/20/2008 11:44 AM
To: tuxaloosa
Subject: [Tuxaloosa] hardware virtualization
 
running the new slack on my main box - AMD Phenom 9500/GigaByte 
GAMA790X/ATI HD 4850/4G RAM (yes, i have a windows partition for 
illustrator/photoshop/indesign and games)...
i want to get rid of that windows partition and im wondering how i 
should continue to use my adobe apps. in the bios on my board there is 
an option to optimize for hardware virtualization. will VirtualBox or 
VMWare make use of my video hardware? i have a copy of crossover office 
that claims to do the photoshop via WINE, but that still leaves me 
without illustrator and indesign (i can live without the games).
what i WANT to do is install an uber-minimal windows xp in a virtual 
machine and run them there. has anyone done this? how does it work? 
which virtualization app should i use? is one better than the rest? i 
remember reading on /. about Suns VBox using the hardware well, but 
haven't used it.
so... what are peoples thoughts?

erik
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