[CoLoCo] virtualization question

[Kevin Fries]

On Sat, 2008-03-15 at 07:49 -0700, David L. Willson wrote:
> OK, you virtualization experts, you tryers of everything,
> Is ~any~ virtualization product getting close to letting me play games at speed?  Even
> half-speed?  In other words, is anything letting the hosted app/machine get to the
> directx/glx/acceleration features of the video card?

The nature of the beast is that you will NEVER be able to execute at
full speed without a card.  The nature of virutalization is that it
emulates the hardware and makes adjustments on the fly.  So, when
Windows asks for a file on a drive, it will request it in a way similar
to the way it does in the boot.ini file (that big ugly hardware path).
The VM engine will then need to interrupt that, and remake the request
from the underlying, host OS in its format.  That takes CPU cycles.

Most of the modern VM engines act in a fairly awkward way, and wonder if
any will very get stable enough when games run.  The reason for this is
that they rely upon kernel mods to get their hooks into the host OS at
ring 0.  Any software that is running hardware as hard as a game does,
could completely crash your machine.  Ring 0 is below where all the
safety catches are.  Therefore, I would be very careful in running
anything that hard against a VM.

But of course I am pretty chicken about these kinds of things in
general.

-- 
Kevin Fries
Senior Linux Engineer
Computer and Communications Technology, Inc
A Division of Japan Communications Inc.