Hot switching of operating systems

[e-freak]

Hey,
first, I didn't found a category for all operating systems so I've put it into the Linux Category, because I guess with Linux it will work first, but feel free to move

So, I have a triple boot system on my desktop with Windows, Mac OS and a Linux Distribution and I really hate switching between those systems. I'm using Windows for games, Photoshop and Music Production and my Mac Book for development, because I don't wanna reboot my system everytime I do something else. So I thought, why is there no way to switch your os without rebooting your whole system? I searched and the only thing I've found was a ThinkPad with dual CPU, where you can hot switch between Linux and Windows.
So I thought about a possible implementation of such a feature and came to the following conclusion: You can standby and wake up a system from standby in a few seconds, so why can't you just switch from one system in standby into another one? Running both or even three systems at the same time would be to hard for most systems, but in standby most stuff is shutdowHey,
first, I didn't found a category for all operating systems so I've put it into the Linux Category, because I guess with Linux it will work first, but feel free to move

So, I have a triple boot system on my desktop with Windows, Mac OS and a Linux Distribution and I really hate switching between those systems. I'm using Windows for games, Photoshop and Music Production and my Mac Book for development, because I don't wanna reboot my system everytime I do something else. So I thought, why is there no way to switch your os without rebooting your whole system? I searched and the only thing I've found was a ThinkPad with dual CPU, where you can hot switch between Linux and Windows.
So I thought about a possible implementation of such a feature and came to the following conclusion: You can standby and wake up a system from standby in a few seconds, so why can't you just switch from one system in standby into another one? Running both or even three systems at the same time would be to hard for most systems, but in standby it doesn't run, so it should be no problem I guess...while this would be the faster way to boot a system back up I know that the system is hold in RAM, so for systems with less RAM the 2nd system could hibernate to keep RAM free (or maybe standby wouldn't even work technically because the system is just running in low power mode, I'm not that into hardware, so I don't know whether you could still use the hardware).
I guess you would need to modify the BIOS for it to work, but maybe there is a way to do this from the os.

I have no idea whether this whole idea makes sense (or whether this is the right place to post) but I would like to get some feedback on this idea and maybe someone else already thought about this or even started implementing something like it.

So, what do you think/know? I'm curious

- Max

 

[Calculagator]

What you are looking for is theoretically possible but practically impossible. All of your OSs would need to be aware of the others and not overwrite the RAM they are stored in. No OS expects another OS to be running at the same time.

You have three options to maximize speed of switching:
1. Use a very fast SSD to reduce boot times. On my mac, rebooting into bootcamp only takes seconds.
2. Use two or more computers connected via kvm or remote desktop. This require more hardware and makes sharing files more difficult, but you can have three computers running.
3. Run some of your os's in a VM. This probably the closest to what you want. On my mac I can have Windows, OSX, and Linux all running at the same time with shared access to files. i can run my bootcamp windows either by rebooting into it (if I need direct hardware access for gaming) or from within OSX for speed and ease of use. There is a performance penalty for doing this, but its really very small. You also get the benefits of taking disk snapshots for backup.

 

[e-freak]

Well, if you would hibernate the systems the RAM would be empty for the "next" System so this wouldn't be a problem. Or maybe, if its a BIOS mod, you could split the available RAM for each system. I got 20gigs of RAM so this wouldn't be a problem I guess. Also I think you could modify linux in a way to allow stuff like this, maybe have a small address space in the RAM for cross OS communication.

1. Yeah, I got a fast SSD but Hackintosh takes some time and my Windows takes a long time too, with all the Autostart stuff. Only Linux needs like three seconds.

2. I can't efford multiple computers, if I could I would. Also file sharing isn't a problem because I got a home server with all private files and applications are installed on multiple hard drives.

3. I had some os's running in a VM, but it just doesn't work that well, especially with multiple screens or low latency stuff (audio prodution)

So I guess for now I'm required to reboot every once in a while, but I think I will look more into this, there has to be a way to achieve this...