Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2795 from 2006/3/21
From: Northern Calif...
As I have previously demonstrated that I have no previous experience with, and know very little about virtual machines, and exactly how SMP works, I will make a statement, or question about the X5000 that may be stupid, but here goes.
Since AmigaOS4.x and MorphOS currently only run on one CPU core, is it feasible at all to think that it could be possible for someone, or some group of programmers (surely outside of Hyperion Entertainment and the MorphOS Dev. Team members) could devise a way to run MorphOS on one of the X5000's CPU cores, while simultaneously running AmigaOS4.1FE in a virtual machine, on the other X5000 CPU core, possibly using separate video cards and monitors, and able to share a portion of memory, for clipboard sharing, but set aside separate memory for the rest of each system, to avoid problems of one OS over writing memory being used by the other OS.
I'm thinking that using a virtual machine this way would be like having a bridgeboard to run the 2nd OS, but instead of a physical bridgeboard, the 2nd currently unused CPU core, would be tasked with running the 2nd OS, on the virtual machine. It would be best, if just one keyboard and mouse were needed, and could be switched back and forth with a special key press combination, or the switching was automatic and the mouse could be dragged from one monitor to the other, which would trigger the switch for both the keyboard and the mouse.
That would be so much better than dual booting, and if successful, perhaps it could also be extended to allow running Linux, or MacOSX in virtual machines on the 2nd core, instead of AmigaOS4.1FE.
I suppose that running AmigaOS4.1FE for Classic Amigas through EUAE on MorphOS, would give similar results, but the performance would be much less, and the limitations of OS4.1 through EUAE make it less of a good option. I'm guessing that AmigaOS4.1FE would be easier to get running on a virtual machine (if what I am describing even qualifies as a virtual machine?), instead of the other way around, starting the X5000 with AmigaOS4.1FE and then running a virtual machine to startup MorphOS3.10
MorphOS - The best Next Gen Amiga choice.