On Apple's Boot Camp

So. Apple now does officially endorse running Windows on Macintels.

In some ways a very surprising move, and in others, one fitting in well with recent behaviour.

Guess this is why Apple joined BAPCo, then!

The rumours at the moment are that 10.5 will include virtualisation, which is allegedly supported in the Core CPU, allowing XP and Linux to be run under OS X.

I also recently read an interesting, if somewhat implausible, rundown on 10.5 features.

I can't see much reason for running Linux on a Mac, frankly - OS X offers most of the same advantages and is a better desktop, and the important Linus apps are available from Fink or Darwinports - but XP, while being a PITA to run under a VM (as Apple, entertainingly, notes - see below) would be a major purchasing incentive for Macintels.
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The dirty secret behind VMware, VirtualPC and all current PC virtualisation*

Some new Macintel owners are discovering that their choices for running non-Mac OS X programs on their new Macs are narrower than they thought. There is no Classic environment on OS X86, so you can't run MacOS 9 or any MacOS 9 applications. Also, VirtualPC, the primary solution for running Windows under OS X on PowerPC doesn't work on Rosetta, Apple's subsystem for running PPC code on x86. (Rosetta, incidentally, is licensed in from Transitive, it's not Apple code. Transitive are doing a deal with Intel to get PowerPC, SPARC and maybe MIPS code running on Itanium, which could be interesting, and help rescue the sinking Itanic.)

At the moment, if you want to run Windows under OS X86, there are 1 or 2 QEMU-based solutions out there, such as OpenOSX.

However, there's an important caveat here. Most people don't understand anything about how virtualisation works, which is fair enough. They might know, though, that running x86 code on a PowerPC will be slow, because they're different chips. This is true.

But running PC emulation/virtualisation software on an x86 chip does not mean that it runs at full native speeds.

( Read more... )

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* Except, possibly, Parallels Workstation on an Intel Core CPU. This claims to use Intel VT, I believe.

It's not all geekery, honest

By the way, if you're bored by all this technobabble, a couple of weeks ago, I posted a piece about snowboarding... Carefully timed for when most of my snowboarding mates were on holiday. I seek comments!