Please comment / advise on following requirement and what is the best way to meet it:
Hardware: Laptop, amd64, 4 core, 4GB for day to day personal + professional use Requirement: Primary usage OS should be NetBSD. A certain use case at work requires use of Windows XP based proprietary software that has to talk with a certain USB device. Current setup: Linux as main OS and WinXP as a Virtualbox guest. Why change: 1. The setup is largely satisfactory, but occasionally printer under cups settings on Linux mysteriously disappear requiring reconfiguration from scratch. NetBSD setup without use of any intermediate daemon would be more stable. 2. Would also like to try Xen in place of VirtualBox. 3. Generally, would prefer NetBSD for most of the use cases. Reasoning would be lengthy for this post. Constraints: The license of proprietary software on WinXP is node locked. Getting a new license is costly. Option 1: NetBSD Dom0, WinXP DomU Cons 1: Restricted to single cpu on primary usage OS. But can live with it. Can possibly use NetBSD as DomU as well. But see the point below which is right now the main constraint. Cons 2: Converting the VirtualBox vdi disk to "raw" and using it as DomU disk hasn't worked. It just leads to "blue screen of death". (A fresh installation of WinXP works, but my constraint is to carry the node locked software as explained above.) If there is a reliable way to port the vdi disk to xen, would stick to this option as the remaining ones below involve at least one more OS to break the jinx. Option 2: NetBSD Dom0, Linux/FreeBSD DomU with VirtualBox based WinXP on top of it Cons: Might work, but not sure whether multiple layers of virutalization (WinXP on VirtualBox on DomU on Xen) is a good idea for stability and performance. Option 3: Linux/FreeBSD Dom0, NetBSD, WinXP DomUs As both Linux and FreeBSD have Dom0 ability as well as they both have VirtualBox, hope to run existing WinXP DomU over them solving the licensing issue. Will also get to use up to 3 cores for each of the DomUs. Cons 1: Booting Dom0 and booting DomU again to reach simple use case like checking mail does not sound very appealing. Cons 2: Have to deal with total 3 OSes with nuances of each. Option 4: Virtualbox on NetBSD over Linux emulation layer I do not have skills to try this. Native Virtualbox on NetBSD - not sure when. Thanks for bearing with a lengthy question. Looking forward to your advice please. Mayuresh