[maemo-developers] AW: [maemo-developers] LiveCD under UML or qEMU?

[From: Benjamin Stadin]

I haven't tried Virtual PC, good summary.

> I should also mention that the "virtualization" performance penalty is 
> actually not too bad, at least in the case of Microsoft VirtualPC. 
> Microsoft people to whom I have spoken about the product say that the 
> penalty is ~15 % or so for processor intensive applications. This is 
> because the guest OS (i.e. the virtual machine) directly accesses  the 
> X86 hardware, i.e.the  X86 instruction set is NOT emulated in software 
> for the guest OS.
>

The same is true for VMware. The advantage of VMware is the wide support 
for multiple OS' and it's capable to access USB devices one the machine.
VMware has also drivers you can compile on Linux and other OS' which 
enhance graphics and disk performance. I've a 2 GHz Pentium M Notebook 
with 1GB ram, and with the tools installed I don't feel I'm running a 
virtual machine. If you try VMware on a laptop it's useful to check the 
option to "format" the virtual hard disk to it's full size when you 
create the virtual machine (in standard setting the file for the virtual 
hard disk will grow with the time). This enhances hd access times but 
eats the full hd space you set in the vm settings at once.
This formatting took about 30 min on my laptop but was worth it.

Regards
Benjamin Stadin