On 12/23/17 20:06, Rusi Mody wrote:
I teach programming.
Students of my class have their own laptops required to have (some recent)
linux.
And this time (for the first time?) I saw that majority of the class were
running Linux (usually but not always Ubuntu) on a VM on a Windows — typically
Windows-10
This made those machines markedly sluggish.
I was wondering if its possible to have a setup in which Linux is installed
(probably on a separate NTFS partition) such that one can choose
- Boot to Windows, start VM, start Linux
OR
- Boot to (native) Linux
Note: This option only makes sense if the Linux booted is the SAME one
Otherwise its trivial and useless
I've used zero-cost VMware and VirtualBox over the years, but it's been
a while. Both stored the VM HDD image (used blocks only) and VM
metadata in files in the host file system. Both offered mechanisms for
mapping virtual HDD images and/or host file systems, partitions, and
devices into VM devices. Their might be a way to put the VM image
directly on a host HDD partition, and then setting up multi-boot. I
would suggest reading the documentation for your hypervisor of choice
and contacting its community.
I believe Microsoft has a hypervisor. If the host is Windows, I would
expect Microsoft's hypervisor to give your students as much as their
laptops can give.
Hypervisors will work the best on computers with the processor
virtualization features (e.g. for Intel: VT-x, VT-d, VT-x with EPT, TSX-NI).
A fast SSD for the host and the VM's is important (e.g. M.2 on PCIe 3.0 x4).
Install only as much Linux as is needed (e.g. Debian Installer choose
"standard system utilities" and "SSH"; if you don't need 64-bits,
32-bits might be lighter).
Alternatively, a live CD Linux distribution. Damn Small Linux comes to
mind.
Further alternate, NetBSD or Minix.
David
