"Vanderpool" or virtualization... how does it work?

Gannon

Senior member
Jul 29, 2004
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I just got a conroe and see an option in the bios to enable "vanderpool" I did a little googling and it seems to be about running multiple operating systems at the same time or within another operating system.... how does it work... and also I'm wondering just how do I go about taking advantage of it?

Obviously it's not simply multiboot where you choose one or the other, you're essentially multitasking operating systems concurrently with one another.

I wasn't sure where to post this so forgive me if highly technical is not the place for this.
 

pm

Elite Member Mobile Devices
Jan 25, 2000
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There's a great article on Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderpool
It's light on technical details, but long on links.

This link has more technical details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine
From this link:
The original meaning of virtual machine, sometimes called a hardware virtual machine, is that of a number of discrete identical execution environments on a single computer, each of which runs an operating system. This can allow applications written for one OS to be executed on a machine which runs a different OS, or provide execution "sandboxes" which provide a greater level of isolation between processes than is achieved when running multiple processes on the same instance of an OS. One use is to provide multiple users the illusion of having an entire computer, one that is their "private" machine, isolated from other users, all on a single physical machine. Another advantage is that booting and restarting a virtual machine can be much faster than with a physical machine, since it may be possible to skip tasks such as hardware initialization.

The best program that I have seen for virtualization - and I have tried nealy every one that I've ever heard of - is VMWare's VMWare Player and Server. It's free - a fact that constantly amazes me.
Download here: http://www.vmware.com/products/free_virtualization.html

They have virtual images you can download (the OS as a virtualized image, saving you the work of creating a space and installing the OS manually) here:
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/cat/45