[MLUG] True Dual Boot

["Christian M. Cepel" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Looking at the Nokia 770, and even more appropriately the blackdog, I'm 
led to wonder... Has anyone out there ever developed a _true_ dual boot 
system.

I don't mean boot to windows or boot to Linux.  I mean when the computer 
boots, it either brings up a firmware bootloader/controller or one 
that's stored on disk.

That bootloader would establish two (or more?) side by side sandboxes 
and manage hardware access, and in one of those sandboxes Linux would be 
loaded and in another, winxp...  One would be 'focused' and it would 
have 'access' to the soundcard, vidcard and display, keyboard and mouse 
input, etc.  Special keys could allow you to access other operating 
systems in their own 'sandboxes' and perhaps view all of them split 
screen like Mac's Expose, or similar.

They would of course be sharing memory, either allocated, or truly 
dynamically shared.  Same for processor.  The controller program would 
allow you to specify thread priority and cpu usage and memory allocation.

Networking would be shared.  When an OS is not focused, the controller 
would suspend device access in such a way as to not screw up the OS.

Frankly, I think my 1.xghz desktop/laptop is pretty much plenty for a 
normal machine (I don't game, and it meets my needs when I render 
video), so let's all that baseline for 1 computer.  1.5ghz 2gb ram. 
Well, the computers that are being sold today, I consider to be two 
computers worth of computer.  I could split a 3+ghz machine with 4gb of 
ram between two concurrent operating systems and still be completely 
content with the performance of both.

Added to this thread priority and load management for foreground & 
background OSs, if you wanted you could idle the background OS if you 
wanted and give priority to the foreground OS.

So...has this been done?  Is anybody working on it?  Is there any reason 
it wouldn't work if the hardware and controller were sophisticated 
enough to keep both OS's happy?

This seems that it would work FAR and away better than emulators where 
hardware access is funneled through the booted OS.

Thoughts?

I like the BlackDog, but I'd much prefer to have things this way.


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