can i run a vm directly from the bios?

[bwanaaa]

are there any mobos that allow this?
one would think this is a valuable option. why do i need to install a full blown os just to add ANOTHER full blown os on top of it.?
A lot of motherboards allow the vm direct access to the hardware-bypassing the host entirely. So what is the utility of installing and maintaining a host OS?

And if you want to get fancy, the bare os running in the bios could even keep the latest set of hardware drivers in flash memory so that when the guest boots, it doesnt even need to go to the net to get them.

 

[smakme7757]

If you just want two OS why not dual boot?



If you just install an OS to a ROM chip that boots on startup then its not a virtualized OS.



VMs have to have some sort of hypervisor to run. Sure you could run the hypervisor from a ROM chip (barring updates) but that's no better than just installing a bare metal hypervisor in the first place.



The whole idea behind virtualization is to increase the value of physical hardware by running multiple OS on the same machine.



*mobile post

 

[bwanaaa]

ok, i dont really know what a hypervisor is and where it runs. how do you load a hypervisor into the bios? the point is that i just want to instal an OS once. in the VM. I just need something to load up a vm on boot.

 

[Ketchup]

I don't really get your post. If you want one OS, just install it like normal. Want two? Make a VM or dual boot.

 

[lxskllr]

A hypervisor is basically a stripped O/S for running vms. That's about as low level as you're gonna get. I agree with ketchup though. I wouldn't mind hearing what you intend as a use case. Why wouldn't you just install the O/S you want from the start?

 

[Fardringle]

I don't really get your post. If you want one OS, just install it like normal. Want two? Make a VM or dual boot.

Agreed. If you want the one OS without a "host" OS, just install the one OS.

 

[bwanaaa]

it would seem safer and easier to recover an install that's a vm than one installed on bare metal. Also if i could run my os wherever i went, it would be completely portable. yes i know there are portable apps. but some things are not portable. And I know that a lot of the pc environment is moving to the cloud so it really shouldnt matter- I should be able to log in to the net and get my stuff. run my apps. etc.

But when you are administering hundreds of pcs and now you have to remote to them to fix a problem, it's a pain. It's a lot easier to ask the user to come to IT and get a fresh copy of the OS that can be run from a USB stick.

 

[BrightCandle]

There is a lot of critical software in a host OS you can't do without for that portability. Drivers are the big one, all the uefi gives us is a basic way to edit the CMOS and get the system booted. It might look quite sophisticated but it can't possible contain the drivers for hardware, there is little point repeating all that when an os can already do it all.

If you want a lighter OS for the host then install one such as Linux. You can get Ubuntu down to 200-300MB of RAM if all its doing is hosting a VM so that will be pretty light and give you the drivers necessary for the VM to run without being ties to the hardware. But bare metal VMs while an interesting idea aren't practical today at all. A Linux own drive however can give you much of the benefits (portability) without needing virtualization. It's mostly a Windows issue.

 

[JoeBleed]

you can already get portable OS usb drives. Linux mainly. XP is also available. haven't looked for win7.

But what you want you need to do with a single install and them setup a full image bacup of the system. when the user has an issue, you restore the image of their machine. It's about the same, but not quiet the same.

A bare metal hyporvioser isn't what you want either. they typically only give you a bland command line interface on the console and are better administered by remote applications.

What you may want to look into though, for a business office with light work load, is some kind of dumb terminal/server setup. Though this probably really isn't going to work for you.

The only other thing that i remember reading about, but never tried, in windows 7, you could setup another instance of windows 7 VM and have it available to launch from the startup options before the main windows 7 option loaded. It's like dual booting, but you're booting straight into the windows 7 VM. Still not what you're looking for but i think it's the closest you're going to find.

What you want will require a sizable hardware change and backing from major OEMs.

 

[bwanaaa]

....
The only other thing that i remember reading about, but never tried, in windows 7, you could setup another instance of windows 7 VM and have it available to launch from the startup options before the main windows 7 option loaded. It's like dual booting, but you're booting straight into the windows 7 VM. Still not what you're looking for but i think it's the closest you're going to find...

Link?

 

[JoeBleed]

This should give you the info you need. I can't find what i was looking for specifically. This is an updated option to allow you to dual boot windows 8 with 8 being in a vhd and 7 being the host.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/dual-boot-windows-7-and-windows-8-using-a-vhd/

I had forgotten that you needed windows 7 ultimate or enterprise for it to work though. (edit: you need these in the vhd. any other version in the vhd will not boot. it gives a license error. any version of windows 7 can setup the vhd and initiate the boot process)

You can not do this with any other operating system other than windows 7 and apparently windows 8. (the vhd) IE the vhd can't be XP or linux that i'm aware.

Edit: my memory is fuzzy apparently, here is the info i was looking for.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/video/windows-7-boot-from-vhd.aspx

I haven't finished rereading it all, but you may be able to have the vhd be other operating systems and may also work with vista.

Edit: I've finished reading just about all of it and with out some serious work, windows 7, 8, 2008 will only boot from the vhd. some people seem like they may have gotten linux to work sort of.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Windows 8 boots in 10 seconds or less on SSDs nowadays. Has Linux kept up?

If it has, dual-booting is more viable than ever.

 

[Mark R]

Drivers are the big one, all the uefi gives us is a basic way to edit the CMOS and get the system booted. It might look quite sophisticated but it can't possible contain the drivers for hardware, there is little point repeating all that when an os can already do it all.

Actually, this is exactly what UEFI was intended to do. The idea was that the UEFI would act as a stripped down OS. Plug-in cards would have their UEFI drivers in ROM, and the UEFI would load the drivers at POST time.

You could then run certain UEFI apps for diagnostic or maintenance purposes (from ROM, or from removable media).

Altnernatively, you could load your main OS, and it would be able to access hardware via the UEFI drivers until such time as you installed the proper native OS drivers. Remember all that press F6 to install drivers stuff when installing windows. This was the exact problem that UEFI was intended to solve.

In practice, most UEFI BIOSs don't bother to get most of that to work, and most hardware manufacturers haven't bothered to install the UEFI drivers into the card ROMs (just installing the basic BIOS extensions for bootable SCSI cards).

Nice in theory. But it is too complicated a system for very little real-world benefit, so virtually no manufacturers have bothered to actually make it work properly.

 

[bwanaaa]

T...

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/video/windows-7-boot-from-vhd.aspx

I haven't finished rereading it all, but you may be able to have the vhd be other operating systems....

exactly what i was trying to communicate...getting the os up and running from a vhd.

but it is an entirely different paradigm than the current crop of computers. it would seem to be a 'make work' kind of approach if you only intend to run one os on one machine. certainly, the current oses and filesystems were written with this kind of monolithic architecture in mind. But when you start to think about replacing the OSes of hundreds of machines, rolling out updates, or even having an 'elastic compute cloud'-enlisting more virtual servers as the demand increases, etc.-then the vhd approach becomes more interesting.

i realize the os has to interact with hardware and the installation process is just that-where software and hardware get acquainted. But imagine if you had to do the same thing with data. Every time you had to save a file, you had to specify what kind of filesystem you were saving to, what kind of hardware you were using, whether it had an MBR or a GPT, how many cylinders in your media, how big the blocks were, whether it was ntfs or fat32 or whatever. The OS handles all that.

So I guess the UEFI was supposed to be like a single unified base mini-OS that could load the vhd containing the REAL OS that could make all the hardware sing. The vhd would then boot properly if it was properly configured with the right drivers, etc. Or it would fail if it didnt. i guess we are not there yet.