Forecast: Regarding Leopard's Boot Camp

[Update: this was written before I realized that Apple had given up on desktop innovation and is only worth reading for the sake of seeing a cool idea that Apple could have added... if only they still cared]

Lately, there are a lot of people in geek-land (no facetiousness here, I love being a native of this strange place) talking about the fact that Apple insists they have no plans to do virtualization in Leopard, and wondering what this means for Boot Camp. Apparently, most people who care about this discussion assumed the current implementation of Boot Camp is no more than a beta leading up to a standard VM solution, a'la VMWare or Parallels. Has everyone forgotten that what we were promised by Intel with their new chips was not software virtualization as we know it now, but a model in which 2 OSs run concurrently, each with raw access to hardware?

Although this is still called virtualization, it is very different than what we generally mean when we talk about virtualization, which is typically a host OS with one or more guest OSs running within it. I've just gone back over Intel's whitepaper on the feature that is now a part of their Xeon chips, and it distinguishes it as a hardware solution rather than a software one. Ironically, it then discusses a micro OS which manages access to the hardware for the running OSs, so, technically, it still basically depends on software. We'll overlook that for now, though.

We use VMWare, Virtual PC, and Parallels at work, and virtualization is a drag as far as I am concerned. Apple is right to have no interest in it as it is mostly a pain in the nether regions to manage, and never really delivers on the promises. I just wasted a whole day trying to migrate a VMWare instance of Windows to Parallels, then wasted another half day trying to get a database backup out of it since it currently cannot access USB, constantly drops its network connection while copying the file, and, of course, can't burn a CD since that seems to be too much to ask of a VM. Don't tell me this is the future because I'll dig an old Mac SE/30 out of my closet and find some new floppies if that is the case. Come to think of it, I think I have a 56K modem laying around here somewhere that will work with it.

To me, Intel's hardware solution is a fairly obvious next step for Boot Camp. This is why I believe Apple is smugly saying they have no plans for virtualization, as they are going to one-up everyone else when Leopard comes out by offering the real solution, of which current virtualization solutions are merely rest areas on the way to. At this point, I'd even say most current solutions feel like one of those creepy rest areas where you're afraid to sit down on the toilet seats and the soap dispensers are all broken. In comparison, if this whole concurrent OS feature of Intel's lives up to the promise, it will be like one of those fancy bathrooms with the dude sitting on a stool handing out mints and real hand towels. Okay, enough of the diversion....

This might also explain the "Top Secret" features nonsense of Steve's keynote. Okay, so he says they want to protect some things from Microsoft's copy machines, but we all know that Microsoft will never make a rapid turn-around in trying to copy real features into the Windows OS. Heck, they can't even finish the features they already planned and promised, do you really think they will try to steal Apple's? And Steve's certainly not concerned about them trying to beat Apple to software virtualization since they already did that when they bought out Connectix. This move gained them their own virtualization solution, VirtualPC, and they have been spending a lot of time lately giving it away and doing viral marketing to try and take the wind out of Linux's virtualization sails. Until Parallels came along, I might even have conceded this victory to Microsoft since I'm just not a big fan of VMWare, but the competition is on again as Parallels has been trouncing VMWare in every category for our uses.

In theory, though, taking advantage of Intel's virtualization might be something Microsoft could pull off in a reasonable amount of time since the hardware is supposed to do the hard part already. Not to mention that they have a whole division of people (again referring to the Connectix acquisition) who weren't always Microsoft employees and might be used to getting real work down within deadlines.

If Apple keeps this somewhat secret and provides whatever drivers would be necessary for Mac and Windows to support the hardware, and get the 2 running concurrently, this could be a huge coup on their part and could add another major level of advantage to the XServe line, and all future Macs that are sold with Leopard pre-installed (presuming they will use chips that include this feature in the consumer lines).

You may ask what the big deal is, but I can promise you that when dealing with mission critical services, having multiple instances on one piece of hardware can save a lot of headache. The current problem, though, is that if the host machine goes down or needs a reboot for maintenance and upgrades, you lose all the guest OSs with it. Under Intel's model, each OS can be rebooted (or crash in the case of Windows) all it wants without any affect to the others. This has obvious appeal, especially if Apple can find one of its typically slick ways to allow passing files and clipboards back and forth between the running OSs.

Back to my point now. Apple is claiming they will not do virtualization. They could be telling the truth, they could be outright lying (hey, it's happened before - they said no support for running Windows and here I am talking about Boot Camp), or using classic marketing BS to tell lies while telling the truth. I feel that the latter is most likely, and that they will be unveiling support in Leopard for Intel's hardware solution. Since it is very different from current methods of virtualization, they'll come up with some fancy trademarkable phrase (like Concurrent Computing or Super Multi-Simul Boot) for the technology and continue to insist that it is not the same as virtualization, indemnifying them from their white lie.

Regardless of the actual strategy, the current abilities of Boot Camp and Paralells are causing Apple to have such a huge surge of sales to previous Windows-only users that they simply cannot let Boot Camp wither. The people have spoken... it's a multi-OS world, like it or not, so give us what we need and we'll happily bite your apple of temptation.

Thoughts?

[if you are new here, see the first post (http://groovechicken.blogspot.com/2006/12/new-look-new-purpose.html) for an explanation of what the point is and the way this house operates]