[LAU] Linux/Windows dichotomy

Mark Knecht markknecht at gmail.com
Thu Oct 21 14:03:02 UTC 2010


On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 6:12 PM, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Ken Restivo <ken at restivo.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:16:00PM -0700, Tobiah wrote:
>>> I've always dual booted, because of Windows games, and for some
>>> Windows audio and music software.  Now I have a firewire interface that
>>> only works with Jack under Linux, which is unpleasing.
>
>  [ ... VMware story elided ... ]
>
>> Cool idea, though I would have run the Windoze in the VM box, and had a real operating system running on the hardware. But yeah, virtualization is a LOT more convenient than dual boot for those who need multiple OSen.
>
> If (and only if) you can run the Windows software inside Wine, you
> will get MUCH better performance than you will from virtualization. I
> do appreciate that this is not an option for a lot of desirable
> Windows software, but the list gets smaller every month.

I run VMWare everyday. Every benchmark I've run runs within 1% of the
the same machine running Windows 7 native. For my money Wine, while
very well intentioned, isn't worth trying to to shave out .5%.

The biggest advantage I get from VMWare and am not sure I'd ever get
from Wine is that the main program I have to run in Windows
(TradeStation) isn't multi-threaded. Under Windows on my 6 core/12
thread i7-980x I don't use more than 2 threads running TradeStation.
(1 for TS, essentially 1 for Win 7 supporting it.) Running VMWare
under Gentoo I often run 5 copies of VMWare which equates to 10
threads leaving 2 threads for Gentoo to control all the hardware. I
don't think Wine will _ever_ run 5 copies in parallel.

Granted, this work is heavily computational and not typical of
anything I do in the audio area, but VMWare eliminated my looking Wine
for a long, long time.

I haven't bothered much with audio on that machine so I cannot say how
well apps like Kontakt might work, but audio output does work so
watching NetFlix, etc., works perfectly.

- Mark


More information about the Linux-audio-user mailing list