Why use a virtual machine?

[Steve Lamb]

Lindsay Mathieson wrote:
> Last time I browsed the VirtualBox forums I noticed that sun are planning 3D
> accelerated virtual hardware support for VB, which would be very cool. No 
time
> scale though.

    This is the holy grail of VMing and I think it will take more than a
software solution.

*Pontification hat on*

    Presently the newer CPUs have technology which allow virtualizers such as
VirtualBox, VMWare, Xen and so on to run the guest OS directly on the CPU.
The last hold out is access to the GPU.  Unfortunately this is a stickler
since, at least for software like VirtualBox, the GPU needs to be in control
of the host operating system to display the window in which the guest OS is
running.  Without control the instructions cannot be run directly on the GPU.

    The current push is on the hardware side to make it so the GPU can be
released from the host OS and given over to the guest OS.  As you can imagine
this needs to be made possible on the hardware before software can take
advantage of it.  Even then it will only be available on applicable hardware;
same as the current CPU virutalization technology is available on a few of the
newest CPUs.

    Of course all of this might be moot in a few years.  There are rumblings
that with multi-core CPUs the age of the dedicated GPU is coming to a close.
IE, we might be on the verge of a shift back to CPU based graphics processing
where one has a quad-core CPU and dedicates 1 core to the graphics and the
other three to the application/game.  If that were to come about then the same
virtualization technology present on the CPUs now might just extend to
accelerated graphics.

*Pontification hat off*

    But I haven't thought of or read up about it much lately so I might be
wrong.  :)

-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | But who can decide what they dream
       PGP Key: 1FC01004       |      and dream I do
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