Windows 7 to add native support for Virtual Hard Disks

By Sam
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Grand Master

Brandon Live Veteran

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And booting from VHDs? What's the point? Windows ****s all over itself if main components like mainboard chipset or CPU change (the emulated environment in a VM is a different one than your real one). Not to mention the funky performance loss on disk IO due to NTFS -> VHD -> NTFS, especially with Windows' ****ty IO scheduler.

Riiiiight... the IO scheduler that Linux has taken over a decade to come close to catching up with. Uh huh.

I swapped out a motherboard + CPU a few weeks ago on this very system. Vista had absolutely no problems detecting the new hardware and booting up just fine. On my Macbook I can boot between VMware and the native partition via BootCamp, and have no troubles at all.

Grand Master

Glowstick

Posted
Posted
Riiiiight... the IO scheduler that Linux has taken over a decade to come close to catching up with. Uh huh.

Yeah, right, the Windows SCAN scheduler is the pinnacle of IO scheduling. Go away.

I swapped out a motherboard + CPU a few weeks ago on this very system. Vista had absolutely no problems detecting the new hardware and booting up just fine. On my Macbook I can boot between VMware and the native partition via BootCamp, and have no troubles at all.

I switched mainboard and CPU too a few weeks ago, coincidentally. Vista however decided to do a boot loop. That did really help, so much for that. And I didn't even change CPU architecture, e.g. from Intel to AMD or the other way.

Maybe not so impossible.

I've already posted that this driver is available since quite some time now. That screenshot means exactly squat.

New Features in Virtual Server R2 SP1

VHD Mount Command-line Tool and APIs

Provides the ability to mount a virtual hard disk file (.vhd file) as a virtual disk device on another operating system.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/virtualse...vsoverview.mspx

Grand Master

Brandon Live Veteran

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Yeah, right, the Windows SCAN scheduler is the pinnacle of IO scheduling. Go away.

Yeah, because you obviously know so much about how NT works.

Seriously, don't most Linux systems still lack I/O prioritization? Cancellable I/O? Last I recall they still don't support propogating I/O completion tasks to user-mode threads, either.

I was mainly talking about how far behind Linux used to be, before the 2.6 kernel, or before AIO started to become adopted. Things seem to be more evenly matched, these days.

Grand Master

Glowstick

Posted
Posted
Yeah, because you obviously know so much about how NT works.

Then tell me how the scheduler works! You're always telling me I'm full of myself, yet never spill the beans to actually correct me. Until then, I rely and believe what I find elsewhere, and they tell me it's a crappy SCAN algorithm.

Seriously, don't most Linux systems still lack I/O prioritization? Cancellable I/O? Last I recall they still don't support propogating I/O completion tasks to user-mode threads, either.

I was mainly talking about how far behind Linux used to be, before the 2.6 kernel, or before AIO started to become adopted. Things seem to be more evenly matched, these days.

How would I know? Does it look like I'm a Linux user?

But seriously, Linux comes with prioritization and cancellable IO. Who the hell knows about completition tasks, ask an actual Linux user. But hey, good job picking arguments that are completely silly, because it took the release of Vista for Windows to get the stuff you're holding against me as an argument. Linux had at least the two things I mentioned around Vista's release timeframe already.

Grand Master

+M2Ys4U Subscriber¹

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... and Microsoft promises this... and then promises that... and then the promises are not accomplished

The same story over and over again.

Let's see the final product, then we talk.

-Rodrigo

You do know this is an advert for employees not a "LOOK HOW SHINY THIS IS!" thing, right?

Grand Master

Slimy

Posted
Posted
Sounds great. But, we should all take a deep breath, remember all the promises of Vista?

So, if Microsoft delivers. Top marks.

... and Microsoft promises this... and then promises that... and then the promises are not accomplished

The same story over and over again.

Let's see the final product, then we talk.

-Rodrigo

Microsoft isn't promising anything. Read the article.

Mentor

ajua

Posted
Posted
I have a nice hat that you might be interested in... it's made from tin foil!

lol

VHD native support would be a more than welcome addition.

Also the virtual drive or disc for mountin disc images would be great. Or at least native support for creating virual folder that run on ram.

Enthusiast

dodgetigger

Posted
Posted

Um, isn't that a feature that was supposed to be in Vista already? I remember I read somewhere that Vista will have the ability to mount vhds that are used by Virtual PC.

Later when I got my hands on Vista, I was quite frustrated when I found out it didn't work.

This is just one of the features that should have been in Vista, and now is coming in the next version.

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