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Use a real Windows 7 partition in Virtualbox / KVM / VMware Player under Linux

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Re: Use a real Windows 7 partition in Virtualbox / KVM / VMware Player under Linux

#11

Post by trentmb »

jackweirdy wrote: post #7

I had the horrifying experience of doing this with Windows Vista. It was at the point where XP's Hardware Abstraction Layer had been depreciated, but there wasn't any documentation for what to use instead. It was really messy. Every time I booted in a VM it thought it was an unlicensed copy, but when I booted from the physical machine it didn't see any problems. I still have no idea what caused that.

I'm going to guess that Windows Activation saw a different hardware config under the VM, so it thought it was running on a completely different machine.

Re: Use a real Windows 7 partition in Virtualbox / KVM / VMware Player under Linux

#12

Post by w1ntermute »

yareally wrote: post #10
w1ntermute wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea's that you can boot into "native" Windows when you need to do stuff with 3D graphics, but boot into virtualized Windows when you don't. This way, you can use the same install for both purposes, allowing you to save storage space and avoid having two different Windows installs that you have to setup and maintain.

Xen has native GPU passthrough, though I've never tried it with a non-vm partition (it is possible to do so though).

Is the performance comparable?

Re: Use a real Windows 7 partition in Virtualbox / KVM / VMware Player under Linux

#13

Post by mig39 »

This is actually a feature of VMware Fusion for the Mac. Or at least it used to be.

If you had a dual-boot system with Windows (Bootcamp) and Mac OS X, you could run the Bootcamp partition under VMware Fusion for most things, and reboot into native Windows if necessary (for some games).

Re: Use a real Windows 7 partition in Virtualbox / KVM / VMware Player under Linux

#14

Post by wtallis »

w1ntermute wrote: post #12
yareally wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xen has native GPU passthrough, though I've never tried it with a non-vm partition (it is possible to do so though).

Is the performance comparable?

Yes. It's implemented using a hardware IOMMU so that transfers between the PCI device and the VM can be properly mapped from the VM's address space to the host's physical address space. There's slight overhead on PCI transactions, but everything happening on the GPU is exactly the same, because the VM is running the same standard Windows drivers. The only real complication is that it removes the GPU from the host's control, so it's easiest to set up on systems with more than one GPU.

Re: Use a real Windows 7 partition in Virtualbox / KVM / VMware Player under Linux

#15

Post by manojlds »

mig39 wrote: post #13

This is actually a feature of VMware Fusion for the Mac. Or at least it used to be. If you had a dual-boot system with Windows (Bootcamp) and Mac OS X, you could run the Bootcamp partition under VMware Fusion for most things, and reboot into native Windows if necessary (for some games).

Still there and the main reason I use Fusion
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