![]() Linux always ran on PC hardware so nothing new there.įor a good long while emulation was still the norm if you wanted to run the software from one OS on another. The components that make up a Mac these days are, by and large, the same components that make up a PC. We stopped getting custom hardware for every OS and the OSes all moved to, or were created on, a single standard platform. The only big change was that hardware platforms standardised. You literally needed a machine several times faster than your target emulated machine in order to run the emulated computer at anywhere near full speed. Quite simply you were lucky if you could achieve 1/10th of the speed of the original hardware. The problem is that this approach is slow. We then run an operating system on top of this emulated machine. ![]() Then all these pieces are put together and as each piece is emulating a bit of hardware we called this an emulated machine. This had to be done for every piece, the processor, the graphics controller, the memory controller, everything. What these differing hardware platforms meant was that if you wanted to use one piece of software from another OS on your machine then everything about that machine had to be analysed to find out how it worked, and then a piece of code written that functioned in the same way as the hardware part did. EmulationĮmulation is like a cousin to Virtualization, they are actually related and have similar goals. There was simply no way one OS could run on the hardware of another machine. These two machines used completely different processor architectures and ancillary hardware. In order for people to be able use the software for one particular platform on another platform (for example, using Pre-OSX MacOS software on a Commodore Amiga) required more than just "installing the software". That operating system tended only to run well on the particular processor and other hardware that was in the machine, with other operating systems only able to run badly, if at all, on the native hardware available. In the beginning we had a computer, that computer could only run one operating system. Other than that in terms of performance a VM can get close to what it would be if it were the main OS, but there will always be penalties in terms of hard drive device access or contention with other resources that the host is using. I do not know how WiDi works, but if it requires direct access to your video card memory in order to share it to a television then it will not work unless you use it from your host (Linux) operating system. It is very doubtful that features like those necessary to play blue-ray discs securely to a supported HDMI display are emulated by the guest graphics card drivers and so this will likely not work.īasically anything that requires hardware support on your host is not likely to work well, if at all, in your guest. You may be able to enable features like 3D rendering in the guest, but this is handled by an intermediate driver in your guest which passes the requests up to the host in a safe manner in order for the 3D to be rendered there. What this means is that the graphics card that your guest OS can see is not the same graphics card that your host OS can see. The main problem is that in order to safely manage the guest operating systems access to devices (and thus prevent the guest OS from trampling over the host and breaking things) all the devices that you want to use must be "emulated". Your question seems to be strongly slanted towards the graphical and interface performance possibilities of using a virtual machine and so I will answer regarding the possibilities there. TL:DR: Virtual Machines are a tool, and while they offer the easy ability to use one OS within another you have to be very much aware of what your intended primary use of the computer will be in order to make full use of the system. I have appended a great deal to my answer below, but I have kept my original answer intact for reference.
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