I know this is probably a totally ludicrous question, but is there a way to have Linux run on one processor and half the RAM in the background while Windows is in the foreground... and switch between them at will?

Nope.

I think you could get quite close to that by running one in a virtual machine in the other. So "no" to exactly what you asked for, but probably "yes" to what you actually want. (But beyond that, I don't know any details).

The closest you could get is a VM, in which you could do that, but only virtually.

How about a hypervisor rather than virtualisation software?

How many hypervisors (apart from e.g., the firmware ones that
come in IBMs p or z series machines) do you know that aren't
part of a virtualisation package?

Hmmm.. well that's too bad. Is this theoretically possible through software? Or would you have to have a specific motherboard to handle such a task?

I tried running Kubuntu as a virtual machine, but there were conflicts with the hardware I believe, so I had to reboot. I basically don't want my windows machine to touch the Net. But if I ran a firewall where I denied outgoing/incoming access on windows, that would also not allow Linux to reach the net. Seems like the only way to do this is to reboot into linux whenever I need the net. (Or rather reboot into Windows whenever I need a software package.)

You could run coLinux. It will only run on one processor in a multiprocessor machine; I'm not sure about multicore but probably the same, and you can use it as proxy to run/block any Windows access to the Web as needed. The downside is that you'll be running Windows.

The other thing you could do if you dual boot is to block access to the Windows machine only with your router (assuming you use one).

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Hmm coLinux looks really interesting, though I'm not really sure I understand how it works. The problem is it doesn't support 64-bit Windows, so that's not an option yet :/ I'm really surprised...hmm.

I was looking at Virtual Box... seems like a good option too?

i think some super computers could do something like that ( but dont quote me on this, of course this could be simply virtualization) but it would require specialized firmware and some means of switching between running operating sytems, the best bet would be as mentioned, a vm

The main issue is can it be done, well, yes. There are example of it I know on different OS's and systems so it does work.

As to you being able to use it, I doubt it. X86 systems were never designed for that. It gets down to the nuts and bolts that can't do exactly totally what you want.


What you do already have is a the ability to set affinity and priority of tasks. You could run a VM and set the affinity to a single cpu core and set priority to the lowest. It will do as close to what you want with the least amount of trouble.

None, absolutely none! I was tossing a conceptual hat into the ring rather than having any specific implementations in mind.

taking ahead what jefro said.... if we can set the affinity for a VM to run on a specific processor then.
what would happen if we used the "wubi" installer and set the affinity of the installer to one processor.
Sorry may be it sounds absurd. but just a thought.

Hi,

I'm quoting!

On Supercomputers we do virtualize along with clustering which are the snowball today. Crays latest release is Linux based but it's been that way for awhile.

None, of course.

Anyway if you want a hypervisor, try Xen.