[fedora-virt] Dual boot Fedora15/Win7 with VM Win7 too

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Mon Sep 26 18:29:19 UTC 2011


On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 01:39:12PM -0400, David C. Mores wrote:
> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >In addition to this, Windows won't work on an unpartitioned disk.
> >There's a very hacky way to do it:
> >
> >https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/technique-for-synthesizing-a-partition-table-on-a-naked-filesystem/
> 
> So does this mean that the ntfs partition on the physical disk looks
> like a unpartitioned disk as presented by KVM to the guest OS?
> How would one hook up the Windows partition to the VM?

Yes; and using the hacky technique described above.  This is really a
shortcoming of Windows.  Linux has no problem booting from a naked
filesystem.

> Are you saying that this is what I should expect to encounter based
> on your experiences with running the physical install as a VM?

Yes, my experiences doing P2V.

> Is KVM technology evolution headed toward making the KVM represent
> the actual physical hardware (chipset, IO devices, etc.)?

No, in fact the other direction.  Emulating real hardware is tedious,
and more importantly emulated devices are much slower than
paravirtualized devices.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines.  Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages.  http://libguestfs.org


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