single host, parallel systems?

avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2063

Wondered about this for a long time, couldn't find a good answer, yet, so I'd like to ask the hardware geeks here: Why is there no (consumer available) way, to run >=2 systems in parallel on a system without using virtualization inside one OS?

To clarify, there seems to be no board with something like VMware/VBox/etc in a dedicated chip, allowing to run say linux and os x in parallel, allowing to share ressources equally or by a user defined kind of percentage.

Even on a board with multiple CPU sockets and if one adds multiple graphiccards, hdds, etc, there's no way - I know of - to do this. Of course, a dedicated chip would also need to run some software, but I'd guess having it directly on the mobo level would theoretically allow (more) native access to the hardware, thus f.e. allowing both systems to use proper graphics accelleration.

Somewhat modern systems have more than enough power to run multiple systems in parallel via some virtualization technology, so that can't be it, so where's the problem having a small hypervisor of some kind to do this?
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pigeon768 · l33t Joined: 02 Jan 2006 Posts: 667

You mean like ESX?
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avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2063

While rather complicated, it's an interesting read, thanks.

Still, this is dedicated software, or are there boards having this built into a chip? Would the latter even make sense? From a quick glance, I couldn't find much about graphics support, though, so I'd guess, one would still be as limited as with a current generation of say VMware Workstation?

What I'd love to achieve is this, all on a single system parked under my desk:

- press some key combo (ie something like sysrq in linux), up comes some kind of management ui where I can start/stop machines and give them focus(ie having it in the foreground to be worked on)

- allow to have multiple systems running in parallel, each gets a (set of) dedicated monitor(s)

- option to auto-suspend/freeze a machine if it's not having focus

- support for dragndrop, shared clipboard, etc

- most importantly, proper graphics support, ie using the card to it's full potential as in a native install, playing games, hwaccelled rendering, etc.

- be rather free in what I can use in terms of OSses and additional device, ie I'd need support for Linux/OSX/Win/BSD as well as external devices like printers and Wacom tablets.

Most of that stuff I already do with a patched VMw Workstation - allowing to install OS X on a linux host - but graphics is a real problem. I don't want to have multiple boxes under my table any longer, I need applications from all major operating systems and I don't want to multiboot the box, having to deal with different types of encryption and filesystems, making it hard to exchange data between the OSses.
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erm67 · Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2012 1:09 pm Post subject:

You mean something like this?

http://www.cpuboards.com

Industrial CPU boards, the problem is usually sharing the monitor, usually the boards communicate through an emulated network connection on the pci bus. No problem for X windows, it is usually fast enough. I had one of those thing to play with a few years ago at a company I worked for.
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avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2063

Interesting concept, but I guess it can only use the graphics on this board? Even if it could use the card on the real mobo, how should one fit at least to of this boards + a graphics card into PCIe slots, let alone packing a cooler on these cards?

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I'm fine with the hardware I have, in fact, it's mostly overpowered for what I need daily. I just want a way to use this power simultaneously with more than on OS. How come that I can pass-through CPU/RAM/HDD to a virtual machine with a minimum loss of performance, but it doesn't work with graphics? Playing a game via WINE often has a noticeably impact, but in general it works pretty fast and smooth, but trying to do the same in a VM fails hard even for simple games like p&c adventures, can't be the overhead of having a full Windows running, since it's speedy for any non-graphic task.

Edit, what's up with the PDF you linked to, mupdf crashes, while poppler works(at least epdfview which I quickly merged). Can someone verify that?
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EatMeerkats · Apprentice Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Posts: 234

You should check out XenClient… it doesn't do everything you want, but it's the closest thing to it that I know of.

erm67 · Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2012 5:24 pm Post subject:

pjp · Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2012 11:37 pm Post subject:

What is "consumer available"?