[wplug] Virtualization On Boot Flash

[Michael Semcheski]

Red Pill / Blue Pill* issues aside, I saw an article** on The Register
claiming that Dell was going to start adding a flash boot area that
contained a virtual machine hypervisor (probably either Xen or
VMWare).  The machine would boot the hypervisor, and then boot the
regular operating system.

So how does this sound?  Your machine boots up, looks at the first
boot drive (which happens to be flash media), which contains a
stripped down kernel with Xen.  This kernel boots, loads up the
network and an NFS mount.  Then, it boots the "Mike's Desktop" image
off of a server.

Optionally, it also loads up a Windows desktop if I want one, or maybe
I want three Linux desktops.  You're only constrained by RAM, really.

I think that would be pretty cool.  For one thing, VM's generally boot
faster than actual PC's.  Another thing, it adds a layer of
abstraction between the PC hardware and the OS.  Applications that
have mutually exclusive dependencies could each get their own instance
of a VM.

I think its potentially pretty cool.  I think it would probably be
feasible with an Intel-VT or AMD-V processor and a USB stick now.

Thoughts and opinions?

Mike

*http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1983037,00.asp
**http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/07/dell_hypervisor_flash/