> Also, I assume for virtualization you are talking about the worst case (perf-wise): running Linux in a VM inside another operating system? Rather than the bet

> Also, I assume for virtualization you are talking about the worst case (perf-wise): running Linux in a VM inside another operating system? Rather than the better one of having a hypervisor directly manage both the user's main OS (win/osx) and linux? Yes. I usually run Linux and WinXP on top of OS X and WinXP on top of Linux. Works great! EDIT: I use VirtualBox OSE. VMWare works even better if you can afford it. Sometimes I use Qemu for trying out toy operating systems, but I find it too slow for actual work.