A bit of advice please.

A bit of advice please.

[Stuart Johnson]

I have two Windows boxes for my day job (Win2K and WinXP).  I will be 
working from home soon, and I don't want more computers in my house.  I 
really want to run everything on Linux if possible.
I plan to get a Core 2 Duo, with Gentoo Linux 64, and at least 2Gb of RAM.

Question:

Can I copy the two Windows hard disk images to a KVM file, and boot into 
them?
Are the serial ports accessible, just the same as if I was running 
windows natively?
Will I be happy with the performance if I have to spend all day in one 
of the Windows environments?

Stuart.



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Re: A bit of advice please.

[Avi Kivity]

Stuart Johnson wrote:
> I have two Windows boxes for my day job (Win2K and WinXP).  I will be 
> working from home soon, and I don't want more computers in my house.  I 
> really want to run everything on Linux if possible.
> I plan to get a Core 2 Duo, with Gentoo Linux 64, and at least 2Gb of RAM.
>
> Question:
>
> Can I copy the two Windows hard disk images to a KVM file, and boot into 
> them?
>   

I'm not sure, having little Windows experience.  I think that if you 
boot in safe mode and install the graphics and network drivers (possibly 
disk as well) you should be okay.  You also need to boot with the 
'Standard PC' HAL (I'm told you reach it by pressing F5 during boot, and 
you can change it permanently by following a procedure documented in the 
FAQ).



> Are the serial ports accessible, just the same as if I was running 
> windows natively?
>   

Yes.  See qemu's '-serial' option.  You can redirect the guest serial 
port to just about anywhere, including the host serial port.


> Will I be happy with the performance if I have to spend all day in one 
> of the Windows environments?
>   

That depends on what you do.  Currently kvm imposes much overhead, but 
then again the Core 2 processors are really fast.  The only way to tell 
is to test.

If kvm is too slow for you at the moment, you can always use an 
alternative like VMware or Xen, and switch back to kvm when we bring 
performance up to par.


And, if you do test, please report your experience to the list.

-- 
Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to panic.


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