[Wylug-discuss] advice on ebook reader or similar...

[John Hodrien]

On Thu, 15 Dec 2011, Dave Fisher wrote:

> On 15 December 2011 10:47, Nigel Metheringham <nigel at dotdot.it> wrote:
>> On 15 Dec 2011, at 10:36, Dave Fisher wrote:
>>> Because low-cost Intel chips don't include support for virtualisation?
>>
>>
>> You can virtualise without CPU hardware virt support - you just take
>> a performance hit (a few % on VMware), and lose the ability to virtualise
>> a system which has a contained virtual machine (and its turtles all
>> the way down).
>
> Thanks Nigel, that's good to know.
>
> Previous (unpleasant) experience with non-VMWare options some years
> ago, led me to believe that the performance hit without hardware
> support was unacceptable.

I'd say the performance hit without hardware support is entirely tolerably for
this sort of thing.  Some OSS virtualisation systems resorted to using a Bochs
emulator to run on top of, and that was truly shocking.  But going back all
the way to VMWare Workstation 1 in ~1998 when there was no hardware assist,
performance was pretty usable.

jh