Deciding between VM or compatibility layer with Linux

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.oO

n00b
Joined
Apr 27, 2013
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Been wondering about this, considering these concerns and interests: portability, stability/security (sandboxing effect), and efficiency overhead.

The idea of the contained VM's (virtual machines) format seems good for segregation and simple portability; to not have to reinstall or reconfigure so much... but it seems like the overhead of extra resources wasted can be substantial.

I'm interested in ideas and opinions from experience about using VM's -vs- compatibility layer (QEMU, KVM) etc; such as advantages and disadvantages... when is the one way better than the other?
 
Well, for one, wine has no sandboxing on it's own. If you can access a file, a program ran in Wine can too. Read and write (or whatever permissions you have, anyway).
 
VMs can be very efficient (not usually 100% though, of course) if they are set up properly and aren't competing with other programs on the system for resources. You need a system with the requisite extensions for hardware virtualization, and sufficient memory and processing power, of course.

Depending on the nature of what you are running, you can over-provision some resources and not run into too many problems. I think there are ways to reduce memory footprint too, but they reduce the isolation (and thus security) of the VM's memory pool.
 
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