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Comment by codeka | Hacker News Reader

I think the author's use case is actually quite rare these days. I personally don't dual boot any more, much preferring to run other OSes in a virtual machine. Then I don't care what filesystems they use internally, all shared data is shared via the VM's interface anyway.

I think that's the way of the future, not cross-platform filesystems.

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While I try to do this often. My macbook even has Win8 and Ubuntu as VMs on it. Running Xcode or Visual Studio in a VM can get pretty laggy, even when I give the guest OS a considerable chunk of my host resources.

I have an i7 920 and 16 gigs of ram, and I have about 50% to the guest, and Visual Studio and Xcode, along with simulators is pretty messy. Running a VM within a VM can do that.

Its the only reason I do a triple boot like this. Otherwise, I would definitely go pure VMs.

Though Parallels on my laptop does a bangup job with Visual Studio.

But then again, the main problem is huge files and lots of writes.

VM's IO performance is usually pretty bad. Try an SSD.

I still duel boot, because I still can't stand the overhead of VMs. However, the tasks I need to do on Windows don't overlap with Linux, so it is not a problem, and Linux support for NTFS seems to be good enough (otherwise I could still make a deticated share partition in FAT.)

Especially when you do 3D stuff the overhead for a VM is no longer acceptable. So I'm also dual booting. I wasn't sure which FS would work well and made partitions with ext2, ntfs and fat32. But also using ntfs now as it just works good enough (no filesize limit and with ext2 I had the trouble that it wants fs-checks once in a while and if I booted just then into Windows I couldn't access it... also VS had once troubles with files on ext2 for some unknown reason).

> Especially when you do 3D stuff the overhead for a VM is no longer acceptable.

I don't really find this true anymore. I run a retina MBP with VMware Fusion and VS2012 in Win7 (Boot Camp partition running in VMware) runs great, with very solid perf when running my OpenGL-based engine. Games run very well, too--the Steam selection on OS X is pretty poor, but I hate dual-booting, and the perf/quality tradeoff is very acceptable to me under virtualization.

Interesting. I have to admit I haven't tried it for a while, because it was always so bad in the past. But I'm also on Linux and not on MacOSX, maybe the situation there is better.

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