Greetings to all. Here's a quick wish for the mighty list. I use Parallels at work. I don't need 3D Acceleration, all my music is under iTunes on Mac OS X. Parallels runs on a secondary monitor attached to my Macbook Pro. Pink Floyd and Mail.app are busy on my MBP main monitor while I swap from XP to Mac OS X as required. I also use Bootcamp. It's a 20 Gig partition, basically just for games and other things that require direct-hardware support that Parallels just can't provide at this time. Windows XP supports Hardware Profiles, for use with different hardware configurations. These I believe are selected at startup to provide the correct set of drivers for Windows with a minimal hassle (though I've never used it before). Here's the wish. I'd like to see Parallels have the ability to read and write DIRECTLY to disk. As in, no image file at all. Something quite similar to pointing Parallels at /dev/sda3 (SDA = Sata Disk, SDA3 is the third partition, in Linux terms) or whatever the Mac OS X/Mach entry is for accesing the partition directly. It would be simple, I believe, to pull off, since the OS already supports this. All that would be required is for Parallels to unmount the partition (if mounted), lock it somehow, and use it as the hard drive for the virtual machine. The reason being, is that I really, really hate wasting 40GB of space when I've got two copies of XP at nearly 20GB a peice. It would be wonderful to just fire up Parallels when I don't need 3D acceleration and other funky features, and have it boot up my Bootcamp installation, and then reboot with Bootcamp when I want to play some Quake 4 and I don't need the features of Mac OS X (which, as I said, I use for Music, Email, and everything else) running in the background. I'm sure XP would probably be fine with this as long as it's done properly. It's just that Parallels needs a "Direct access to Partition/Drive" feature as the boot disk. -S'Captain
Well, yeah. Providing that: A) Windows XP's hardware profiles is a feature that will handle both the Macbook, Macbook Pro, and Parallels without barfing B) Parallels Tools doesn't barf if it isn't running inside Parallels VM Then all we'd really need is the feature to directly write/read to a partition or hard drive, as the Parallels VM HD (I think, anyways?). I've ran other VM packages before, pointing them at ether partitions or physical hard drives, like /dev/hdb in the case of Linux. Such a setup- installing Windows XP to the drive in the virtual machine, basically landed you up with a drive inside the computer, that had a good OS installation that could be removed from the VM and booted on the host system without the VM environment. It would be great to see a one-button setup function in Parallels, if a Bootcamp capable partition was detected. Just push it, and vola. You've got a VM ready to fire up using the WinXP partition on your OS X drive. -S'Captain
Parallels have said, months ago, that direct partition support was on their roadmap. this would provide the ability to use a real partition as a VM disk. This would not be enough to allow booting from a bootcamp partition though. One issue is the HAL, which (I think) is not something hardware profiles can switch. Another issue is activation if using XP (or Vista). The bootcamp view and the Parallels view of the hardware are very different, so Microsoft's "You're a criminal until you prove otherwise" module won't be happy. The ability to boot Parallels from a bootcamp partition has been asked for over and over here over the last few months, so if they can, they probably will (at some point). I'm not holding my breath though.
I would like to see Parallels have the ability to support USB devices that OSX does not support. If there is a USB device that is not recognized by OSX, Parallels should have a way to find it and make it visible to the VM.
