the way i understand it hibernating an OS dumps ram to a file and powers off, so could it be possible to run two OSs “simultaneously” by alternating between hibernations?

  • jetA
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    6 months ago

    Technically yes. There’s nothing special about the code running in the CPU. Long time ago there was an application that would switch from Windows to Linux without rebooting. But it was super unstable. You didn’t reinitialize all the memory… Some devices on the bus expect to get initialized one time, and can’t be reinitialized later after the system’s powered on, It’s asking for trouble

    What you really want to do, is have multiple operating systems running on different cores at the same time. And this is an ideal use case for a hypervisor like Xen which is a microkernel. That will then dedicate a CPU to any operating system you want, so they’re running in parallel.

    Then swapping between the operating systems is as simple as giving one control of the keyboard video and mouse.

    This is as close as you can get to having two different computers running side by side.