[mesa-users] using MESA for education

[Dean Townsley]

On 06/08/2014 07:43 PM, Josiah Schwab wrote:
> As is, MESA (9GB) can't fit on a DVD (4GB).

Yes, I think a USB stick based install is more realistic.  32G sticks 
are only $15 these days.

> Does anyone have any experience running MESA in a VM (e.g., VirtualBox)?
> Any idea how much of a performance hit there is?
>
> A VM image would have the advantage of not requiring the students to
> provide any installation media.

Yes, I think an VM would be ideal, since then the student wouldn't even 
need to figure out how to boot from external media.  This is different 
for every PC vendor currently.  It would also be very "safe" in that it 
would just software.

On performance I would think the biggest question is whether the VM 
supports multithreading.
 From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox
"VirtualBox supports some guests (including 64-bit guests, SMP guests 
and certain proprietary OSs) only on hosts with hardware-assisted 
virtualization 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware-assisted_virtualization>."
I think this means that most commodity systems (i.e. non-server-grade 
cpus) would not support SMP in the VM.  That would slow Mesa down pretty 
significantly.


Dean
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