On a MacBookPro, there were a number of bug fixes. Filesharing through the network is easier, but still direct folder sharing would be better. OSX still crashes when waking from sleep with a machine restart if VM is running I could not mount or see a second hard drive, even after adding it Booting Windows 2000 sp4 seems to take much longer with beta2. Once booted overall speed seems to be the same. Glad to see bugs quickly fixed, but as mentioned before, maybe someone from parallels would post a sticky with know bugs, limitations, workarounds and unimplemented but promised features.
Crashes I've also seen it crash when coming out of sleep. Additionally I was able to crash it by SIGSTOPing it and then SIGCONTing it, though not every time. Sam
Getting better... I can now network to my host, yippee! However, since I'm on an Airport netowrk and using DHCP my IP address is not constant. This means I have to keep going to "Add Network Place" and start over with the new IP address periodically. This takes a couple minutes to achieve. In order to truly be a better solution than Boot Camp, the time it takes to start up or switch to the virtual machine needs to be faster. Right now, between start up/shut down time and fixing the network connection to the host to transfer some files, I can do it faster by rebooting via Boot Camp. I'm sure you guys will smooth out these wrinkles, though. Good job on the fast development time on Beta2!
Just want to point you to pause feature. Allows you to pause your VM and free all host resources. The pause/start operation takes less than 1 second.
When i pause a VM it still uses 35 - 45% CPU. Is yours doing the same? I'm using beta2 and i have a MBP - 1.83GHZ 512MB 80GB. -Levi
Also chews CPU here Same here with MBP 2.0GHz. Parallels uses 30+% when the guest is idle (Linux using HLT), and a slightly lower 22-25% when paused. Seems as if Parallels is busy doing something when it needn't be. I use VMWare and Xen extensively elsewhere so I know that the overhead can be very low. I would have expected even lower CPU overhead using VT-x. This is most important bug for me as it seems quite a fundamental issue, while the other problems (network, usb, etc) are more or less what I would expect in a beta. -Jamie
Yes, definitely slower to boot up (stays on the Welcome bootup screen a lot longer) and just a bit more laggy when running windows programs. The mouse is a big improvement though.
I ran Shark against a paused VM and basically all the time it spent was in ml_set_interrupts_enabled. The rest of the time was spent in sleep and finding the time of day which is what you would expect it to be doing. Mine uses 28% CPU on my MacBook Pro when paused.
