OS Quick Switching

I am planning out a desktop build and was wondering the following:

I am planning on working primarily in a linux environment, but would like the option of quickly booting up into windows to game and being able to resume my linux session right after.

Would it be possible to do the following?

1. Boot linux
2. Pause any running programs (using the 'kill -Stop' command)
3. Hibernate linux
4. Boot Windows
5. Shut down Windows
6. Resume linux session

I plan on using a SSD for my OS partitions if that makes any difference (and either Arch/Ubuntu with Windows 7).

Also the partitioning should look something like:
-Windows OS partition
-Windows App partition
-Linux OS partition
-Linux Swap
-Data (on a RAIDed HDD)

Thanks!

 

What about running Linux as your main OS and running Windows in a Virtual machine within Linux? I have never done it myself but it is an idea for you.

 

I think that VMWare has problems with 3D intensive apps, but I'm not sure. Also, there's a performance hit.

 

Although this will work, step 2) is not needed, but from my experience the reverse process will not. Booting Windows, hibernating the OS, and booting Linux in turn results in problems mounting the root filesystem.

All this trouble is really a waste of time if you simply virtualized Linux, or, if you prefer Linux as host, you could run VirtualBox 3.0 which supports 3D hardware acceleration and would theoretically allow you to game on a Windows guest. You should check out how reliable this functionality is, however, before proceeding to implement it.

 

Thanks for the reply!

I will definitely be using Linux as the host (WIndows just to break from work), so I shouldn't be hibernating Windows at all. I'll check out Virtual Box, but using the method proposed in the original post, I would suspect that this would give up the least performance.

 

I think you should be able to hibernate linux, and boot into windows to launch up a game (is what I do), and then resume back into linux...hang on, I'm going to do it right now. But, you've got the right idea, i.e. using windows as a gaming platform.

EDiT: OK, I'm back from a Ubuntu hibernation after booting into Vista....works no problem with Ubuntu.

EDIT2: There's no point in hibernating if you're going to kill the linux programs.

 

Can you try booting Windows, hibernating it, and booting Linux? I distinctly recall having problems with that in the days of 7.04/7.10. Or maybe it involved hibernating both.

EDIT: check this out: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=642195

 

Thanks!

Well not kill the processes, but pause. This is a concern because I run programs that can take weeks to complete. I would rather not have to stop them to scratch a gaming itch (I normally submit these jobs to a cluster, but sometimes I run debug on a local machine).

 

Dire NTropy, just run the hibernation routine and it'll pause all the programs. The linux hibernate options are very configurable. What distro do you run? If you run arch, I can point you to all the control scripts. (Are they common to all distros?) Otherwise, just poke around IRC and you'll get something.

I use TuxOnIce and the only tweak I have is to drop all unnecessary buffers and caches before hibernation, which speeds up the process many times. ( echo 3 > /proc/vm/drop_caches)

EDIT: It just occured to me that maybe only TuxOnIce is capable of restoring the system memory completely???

BTW, my setup is kernel 2.6.30 with tuxonice 3.0.1 patches, and I can do what you want easily: Arch / Windows 7. The setup is very easy to get with Arch because of this kind soul and this fine manual.

 

I try that next time I into Vista and see....