Ars reviews Parallels Desktop for MacOS X, and concludes: “People pondering the switch to a MacBook can rest assured that with the exception of USB device support and hardware accelerated 3-D applications, their needs will be well met by this little workhorse of a program. Between the networking that just works, the impressive speed and the inability of the client operating systems to know they are running within a ‘virtual machine’, I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find software for any x86 OS that doesn’t work within a Parallels VM.”
But why oh why would you want to run Windows software on a Mac?, I can sort of understand it on Linux but a Mac!
Is this the best way Apple can get Windows users across?, ohhhh so thats why they switched to Intel, not because their market share was getting nowhere.
I will be handy for those who are switching to Mac and still need to use some older Windows-only applications.
And for example I’m developer of cross-platform applications and it is very handy to test all of those without rebooting my main desktop and having too many partitions.
Uhm, you are aware of the fact that Parallels handles multiple operating systems other than various versions of Windows such as Linux, *BSD, and Solaris?
I for one use Parallels for running a development server on my laptop (handy to always be able to bring it along) using Ubuntu 6.06. I also use it to run Windows XP as I need to do so in order to cater for one of my clients.
Sometimes you don’t “want” to but you “have” to!
My network diagramming tool of choice is Omnigraffle – awesome! It’s a windows world out there sadly and sometimes I must use Visio. Parallels let’s me get at that app and any other “corporate” standards for 49 bucks at full speed.
That’s a bargain IMHO.
One word: Games.
I’ve got a “significant” investment in Windows games, and the MMO I play doesn’t have a Mac OS X client. Until I’m done playing them, I need some way to run them.
Since getting my iBook, my XP desktop has turned into an expensive games console. :-
– chrish
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Isn’t Parallels a Hypervisor ? and not a virtualization software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor
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The hypervisor is the central component of a hardware virtualization solution. It handles resource isolation such that each guest thinks it has unfettered access to the hardware.
This is just one kind of virtualization. The simplest and most flexible, but with some significant performance overhead. Paravirtualization (Xen) offers almost as much flexibility with a significant reduction in overhead, but guests must be specially patched unless you have the new AMD/Intel CPUs with virtualization support. VMWare and Parallels might begin to exploit paravirtualization concepts on machines with such hardware. OS-level virtualization (OpenVZ, VServer, Zones, Jails) offers the least amount of flexibility, since all guests share a common kernelspace, but has the absolute minimum of overhead. This is often used for server consolidation, security, and manageability.
Virtualization is a really old concept that has taken its sweet time to reach our personal computers. Virtualization was the fundamental concept behind the mainframe. What it meant to be an OS back then was a completely different thing, and really the hypervisor was the OS of the mainframe. It handled timesharing between concurrently running programs. The modern PC OS, like the UNIX systems before it, includes support for concurrent programs (or multitasking), so the need for virtualization on the PC hasn’t materialized until recently. While server consolidation and RAS considerations have driven demand for virtualization in the UNIX space for the last several years, the primary factor driving demand for virtualization on the desktop is cross-platform compatibility, and that is (remarkably) a very recent phenomenon.
Doesn’t Parallels already support hardware virtualization on x86? Their page says
“# Optimized for Hardware Virtualization: Parallels Workstation’s lightweight hypervisor fully supports the benefits of next-generation CPUs built on Intel’s VT architecture, and will support AMD Pacifica architecture when it is released to the general public.”
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Under what should Parallels be categorised: a) Hypervisor, b) virtualisation app c) or what ?
Are there security concerns for the “mother” OS, (in this case the Mac OS X) ??
I was reading this here – a post by user: 10190 at MacSlash
http://macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=6081&cid=108843
quote:
Virtualization is really cool.
But Parallels’ seems pretty dangerous; I was curious about how it can claim to be a Hypervisor based system but not require restarting after installation. This made no sense to me as a real hypervisor runs underneath all of your full OSs including the so called primary OS. So I downloaded the linux tarball to see what I could learn about how this amazing new hypervisor works.
Fortunately for me, the source code to some of the kernel modules was included in the tarball. I have not completely analyzed it, but have found a few things that trouble me pretty deeply. For example:
Extracted from parallels-2.1.1670-lin/data/drivers/drv_main/ioctl s.c
<snip>
if (copy_from_user(&mFunc, arg, sizeof(struct monitor_functions_def_t) * MONFUNC_COUNT))
break;
/* setup functions pointers */
for (i = 0; i < MONFUNC_COUNT; i++)
param->iData.Moni torFuncs[i] = (monitor_funct_t)mFunc[i].fId;
/* initialize callbacks */
vmSetExports(param);
/* Monitor open */
if (param->iData.MonitorFuncs[MONFUNC_OPEN]) {
ret = param->iData.MonitorFuncs[MONFUNC_OPEN](¶m- >drvInfo, 0, param);
}
</snip>
This is part of the ioctl() handler for a device created by the drv_main module installed by Parallels workstation.
Basically, it copies some function pointers in from user space, installs them as event handlers (for what I’m not entirely sure yet), then calls one of them! RUNNING AS KERNEL CODE! And it presumably calls the others at some point.
It is true that prior to this there is a check to ensure some salt matched the value provided at module load, but this seems incredibly dangerous. It is effectively creating a rootkit installation device. Learn the magic salt and own the machine. I was pretty excited about this product until I started digging. Given my interpretation of what I’ve found I don’t think I’ll be installing anything from Parallels any time soon. Of course, this is just the linux version, but my understanding leads me to feel that the OS X version isn’t much better.
As I said, I haven’t finished analyzing the code. I could be wrong, but this sure looks bad. If someone from Parallels (or anyone else) would like to convince me that this isn’t exceedingly dangerous they are certainly encouraged to try.
/Quote
Should we be concerned about security issues regarding Parallels on Mac OS X ? – or am I just being a bit Paranoid :Þ
Edit: I absolutely don’t want to discredit this (seem to me) fine app, by raising this question. Parallels just seems to be too good to be true.
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Edited 2006-07-10 23:17
I really hate this particular piece of FUD, because it keeps appearing.
This type of code is absolutely, 100% essential for running virtualization. I work for VMware, we do the same thing (you can look at the Linux module code and see for yourself).
Virtualization requires root privilages BECAUSE it takes over from the host kernel. Duh. End of story.
Re: categorization … Parallels a hypervisor of sorts, and an app to load/unload/control that hypervisor. I should point out that writing the hypervisor is easy (especially with VT); writing the controlling app, that’s hard.
This review is thorough, well-written, and funny in a not-so-annoying way. I like the visual comparison of Parallels vs. Virtual PC performance. It’s worth reading, so go ahead and read it. Yeah, I’m looking at you…
Parallels looks a lot like VMWare in places. In fact, certain dialogs are nearly identical. I just wonder if there’s more to this? Macs switch to Intel, all of a sudden there’s a full-featured hardware virtualization solution for Macs that looks incredibly similar to the leading hardware virtualization solution for Intel PCs. Anyone know if there’s some sort of cross-licensing going on here?
GPU virtualization is a tricky business. I’m not so sure this is something that can be hacked in the 1-2 year timeframe, not without some driver support from the graphics vendors. It has to happen, though.
I have not used the new Mac version, but I played with Parallels for awhile on Windows, including many of the betas in addition to the latest release. I think it has nothing on VMWare or VirtualPC.
VMWare is faster and more useful overall, and VirtualPC is more compatible at the low level, albeit about the same speed as Parallels. This may be a little old school, but VirtualPC does an excellent job of emulating DOS to some degree. Parallels flat out sucks at it. It craps out constantly trying to run certain DOS games. Now you may be asking, why run DOS games under any emulator? Not to play them, but test compatibility with a real x86 PC. Let’s face it, nothing does more hardware calls than a DOS game, so it’s the best thing out there to test hardware level x86 compatibility. VirtualPC comes out on top of the three, although it is indeed limited to a Windows host.
I placed Parallels third behind VMWare (great for Windows + Linux) and MS VirtualPC/Virtual Server.
I imagine VirtualPC has an edge in this area in part because it emulates a standard PC video card (S3 something, IIRC) instead of having a custom emulated video adapter.
since I read a review as nice as this one. Lots of funnyties and well worth my time.
So I can have a Mac for connectivity, hardware compatibility and presentations, Debian for productivity and Windows for . All running at the same time, on the same machine. Throw a roll of heat reflecting aluminum foil into the mix and you could perhaps even use that notebook on your lap. Now that is a winner.
Debian for productivity
ROFLMAO (weeps a tear of his eye).
Yes and some people might try to boil an egg by rubbing it.
It’s maybe me, but I really… really.. really.. don’t see what’s funny about using Debian for productivity. Personally, for me, I’m much more productive on Debian than on Windows/OSX/any other Linux distro.
It might not work for you and that makes it funny for you that it does work for lots of other people? Honestly, using OSX to do work feels for me like boiling an egg by rubbing it. If you try to bend like OSX wants you to bend, you’ll eventually get there. Debian let’s me go straight to my goal. Windows feels exactly the same.
Yes and some people might try to boil an egg by rubbing it.
Well, OSX sucks a**e compared to any mature Linux distro when it comes to doing bioinformatics, molecular phylogenetics, statistics, development, clustering, server tools or even X11 tunneling. Which is what I need. That, and the Mac GUI and Finder is perfectly useless and bloated, for me. Try managing 50 windows at the same time on OSX. Doesn’t work for me. With Fluxbox I can. With Konqueror I can have seamless FTP/NFS/SFTP/SMB and a well integrated command line tracking my movement in the file system. Priceless. While OSX may be pretty to look at (Keynote for instance), the basic stuff is still lagging behind and has always done so on macs. Unfortunately.
Trust me buddy, what you are doing is so far away from “basic” it isn’t even funny. Honestly, what percent of ALL computer users do you think do bioinformatics, molecular phylogenetics or statistics? 1% is pushing it by a long shot in my opinion. Most probably don’t even know what those words mean.
When I think “basic”, I think listening and downloading music, burning DVD’s, NO COMMANDLINE (I haven’t seen a non-geek use a commandline in over 10 years), no clustering and no X11. Throw in some spreadsheets and word processing while you’re at it. For 99% of computer users and what THEY NEED TO DO, both OS X and Windows drag Linux around the room, mopping every little inch of the floor.
Your needs are niche, not basic. Macs have their own niche, including media editing, video editing, etc. And guess what, this kind of thing is still lagging behind and has always done so on Linux, unfortunately.
Each OS for a different task. I personally view Windows as a pretty good general use OS, Linux/BSD/Solaris/etc as good for what you do and OS X is perfect for Grandma’s and other computer illiterate people (nothing wrong with this, everyone has their priorities, and a lot of people on these websites fail to realize that for the majority of people in the world, computers aren’t one of them), as well as for media editing and other related tasks. Hell, even Amiga, SkyOS etc have their own small place in the world of computers.
Oh, and people like pretty interfaces, it’s easier on the eyes. After using a Mac, seeing a Linux desktop makes me cringe (although SLED10 does look pretty nice).
Trust me buddy, what you are doing is so far away from “basic” it isn’t even funny.
I never said I only had “basic” requirements for my computing. In fact, the problem I have with the Mac platform is that it makes too many assumptions about how I should do stuff, and it downweights versatility and flexibility. I get the freedom I need to be productive with Debian.
When I think “basic”, I think listening and downloading music, burning DVD’s […] Throw in some spreadsheets and word processing
Basic multimedia and office stuff is trivial in most desktop environments nowadays. Apps like Amarok, kaffeine, kplayer, k9copy, k3b, OOo, kontact, krita, gimp etc. are really quite powerful and usable in my opinion. If the basics is what you need, then I can’t see why you should pay the Mac overhead. Go for a cheap Dell and put Ubuntu or Suse on it. For fun.
I can agree that GNU/Linux has some obstacles to overcome. Plug-and-play connectivity is lacking – syncing your todos and calendar and adresses with your bluetooth phone or palm is f*****g difficult. Its a mess really at the moment, but a new syncing infrastructure is being developed. Attaching/removing a second monitor on the fly is not possible without running into a lot of X11 oddities, configuration gotchas and driver problems. Don’t try this at home. ACPI on laptops is a pain. The point is that these fairly “advanced” limitations are very much due to desktop linux still being pretty young, and they are actively adressed by both communities and companies, not ignored because some board has decided that such features are not important to their average customers. In the FOSS community, all users are above average.
Macs have their own niche, including media editing, video editing, etc.
Agreed. I would not try getting our Sony DV lab camera talk to my Debian system whilst having an OSX machine dedicated for those tasks just standing around at the office. The same goes for live DJ tools, for instance. Mac are still kings for easy desktop multimedia content creation, I dont know much about professional studio or movie editing stuff. Playback you can do easily on any platform. There are interesting stuff coming for Linux here as well though – projects like Jack, Cinelerra, Jahshaka and dyne:bolic. I (and I mean I) don’t mind spending some time learning these apps. They are FOSS and the codebase will probably be around and improved for some time. Instead of buying into this version of that Mac app that requires 10.6, whereas the next one will need 10.7 and so on. I can understand the Mac way if you rely on certain media apps to get the job done. But my next metal demo will be produced with FOSS only, those tools are good enough for me.
people like pretty interfaces, it’s easier on the eyes
Me too, thats why I prefer QtCurve for KDE apps and Fluxbox with a manually fine tuned theme.
* Yes, computers are a hobby of mine and I do not claim that others should use their machines the way I use mine. The Mac defaults and way do not suit me.
* If all you need is basic home desktop apps, try a Linux distro for a few days. Most won’t cost you a penny and it is hard to argue with free. You’ll need to learn to take advantage of some concepts like root/superuser vs user, distro-specific point-and-click package management and community forums; the latter two of which are pretty non-existant for the Windows/OSX platforms in comparison.
* The best things in life are Free. Or cheap. If you need a Mac to play media, office and internet – fine. Else, buy some cheap box and a last minute trip to Egypt/Florida for some snorkeling for the remaining money. Adore the pictures in digiKam or Picasa and firefox them on Flickr. Or stare at your empty iPhoto album.
Excellent software, well worth the money. It’s a dream come true to be able to run the 3 OSes I use in my daily life/work on the same computer, at the same time. And that’s a laptop. 🙂
Why is this question ever asked?
People want to run Windows software on a Mac, or Linux, or anywhere else, because they need some Windows-only piece of software.
Not because they like Windows. Not because they like those one or two Windows-only applications. Because they need those apps, and don’t have any choice.
Need. Not want.
Imagine that you can get all of your work done with a Mac, but the company timecard system only supports Windows. Do you want to get paid?
Mac OS may be the best tool for 95% of the job, but there’s that last 5%. You could go with Windows alone, in order to get a 100% solution that sucked for 95% of the work. Or you could use the best tool most of the time, and work around Windows lock-in morons with Windows in a VM.
Was that you can’t install the latest Ubuntu with over 512MB of assigned memory, otherwise the install fails.
Took me a long time to figure out, none of the other OS’s had the problem.
Funny they mentioned USB.. I purchased Parallels BECAUSE OF THE GOOD USB support.
My wife has a software package for her business that runs only in Windows, and it uses 1) A propetary USB License Dongle, and a propetary USB memory card reader…and BOTH of those worked great.
Startup parallels, then plug your usb devices in and they are automatically added to the windows client.
In my experience the USB support worked GREAT, and my wifes loves being able to run that app on her MacBook!
#1 Can you make Parallels boot off a partition. So you can Boot camp or Virtualize.
#2 Will the Parallels Image work with other virtualization tools like vmWare say with tricks like renaming the file.
These are the quesitons I would like to know.
It’s ironic that eventualy Mac users have the urge to run alternative OSs and even the one they came from on their shiny Mac. I am not talking about those that NEED to, I am talking about those that feel disjointed and WANT to. And also, why do Mac people feel they have to CONVERT everybody to Macs? I get people like that knocking on my day everyday from certain religious denominations…are YOU one of those people?? Do I need to be saved by YOU??
Yes, Mac users “want” to run Windows, which is why they bought a Mac instead of buying a Dell.
It’s such a ridiculous argument that its not even funny. If Mac users wanted to run Windows, they wouldn’t have bought a Mac. There’d be no point in doing so.
Alternative OSes are fun and sometimes Windows apps are necessary. Mac Users just want OS X in control of the show.
I’m a Mac user and I couldn’t care less if others “join the cult” or not. As long as there are enough of us to keep Apple developing OS X I don’t care if the other 95% of the world join or not.
Feel free to stick with whatever it is you are using.
I don’t own anything made by Apple, and find some Apple fans annoying. Then again, many Microsoft fans and Linux fans are annoying, too. ‘Fan’ comes from ‘fanatic’, and the problem is fanaticism, not the object of the fanaticism.
Most people don’t want any OS. They want to run applications. In the past, they’ve had to put up with whichever OS supported their most important applications, and settle for inferior choices for some apps. Virtualization allows them to pick the right tool for the job, even if it runs under a different OS.
This can only be good for users. For application developers, too. But it does threaten those who use the OS as a tool to restrict and control the choices made by users. And, of course, cult members who bought into that One True Path mantra.
I don’t use a Mac, but I understand why others do. I don’t like Windows, but I understand when others do. I do use Linux and Solaris, but I understand that they aren’t right for everyone.
Choice is hard, choice is uncomfortable, choice is scary. It’s easier to let someone else make the decisions. Anyone who disagrees with your chosen leader’s decisions is a threat, and must be attacked. It happens with politics, religion, music, and even software. Don’t stray off, stay with the herd. There may be more than one herd, but only sheep belong.
I like making my own choices. Your choice may differ from mine. I don’t see that as a threat. Lack of choice is the threat. Lack of choice is a sign of trouble. So lets all raise our glasses and toast technology that increases the number of applications that we can choose from!
Is it possible to compile linux apps to run on a Mac, since Mac uses a Unix kernel and now runs on x86 chips? Or do they need modification before they’ll run? IOW, by switching to a MacBook do I get OSX plus the ability to run all the FOSS that I get from Linux, on the same platform? Or would I need Parallels to run any linux apps?
You can get fink an recompile most of the stuff it will then run under X11 and suck even worse than their originals, or you can hope that it’s a GTK+ app or a Qt app that will recompile without a hitch on the native version of GTK+ or Qt on OS X (if you’re luckier the developer might even offer precompiled versions like with AbiWord http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/11511).
In that case the apps will almost look like they have been made for OS X and will only suck a bit.
Or you can look for Cocoa apps (many of which are OSS*) that were made from the ground up for OS X use all the pretty cool features (Services, Linkback, full Unicode support, Spotlight, Core Image, easy addressbook and media integration, you name it) and never look back 😉
*e.g.:
http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/apps.php?sub=100&w=1&t=1
Smultron, Cyberduck, Adium, Fugu, Chicken of the VNC, Quicksilver, Tofu, RName etc.
Edited 2006-07-11 04:46
I’m running Parallels on my Macbook Pro and it performs brilliantly. Speed is excellent and, in full screen mode, it “feels” exactly like you are running the virtualized PC natively. The only thing really missing are the Parallels Tools for Linux – they are available for virtual Windows installs and add little extras which make the experience smoother (e.g. smoothing out mouse movements).
Very good value for money on a Mac (haven’t tried it on other platforms yet). I’ll be very interested to see a VMWare / Parallels comparison when VMWare is released for the new MacIntels.
VMware has *experimental* support for 3D acceleration and SMP for the guest OS, as well as support for 64-bit guests (not for me though. My athlon isn’t new enough).
Also, it’s vm tools run on Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. Plus X.Org has a vmware driver, so Solaris, NetBSD, etc etc have decent video support.
USB has worked great for me, and though I haven’t tried, I suspect VMware can’t use my burner, though I’d imagine a USB one would work.
You can also use your serial and parallel ports, and you can attatch any scsi device you have directly to the guest. Raw disks also work.
VMware (Windows host) has also never crashed on me, even when abusing multiple guest OS’s.
DOS games run like crap, as only basic VESA support is included. Your much better off playing your dos game straight in XP. DosBox is even cooler.
For networking, VMware can share the connection, use a NAT setup, or be networked only with the host (and other VM’s if you put them on the same virtual network). With Windows guests, you can just drag files from the host into the VMware window and drop files on desktop, and vice versa. Also, when you resize the your vmware window, a Windows guest will change resolutions to accomodate.
The best part is it’s snapshots. You can take snapshots at any point, and even branch off from previous snapshots and do something else. I’ve found that infinately useful.
Based on the article, VMware is leaps and bounds ahead. Of course, it also costs much more.
And it’s currently vapourware on the Mac which gives Parallels Desktop a bit of an advantage.
The comparison is still valid, though.
Several of the features that VMware has that Parallels lacks are currently experimental, and it’s not entirely reasonable to expect Parallels to have those features in a first release.
One thing I would expect is the ability to virtualize OSX when running on a Mac, but I see no indication that it’s possible to do so. That should be the focus of the next release, even if you can only do so on the OSX version.
True, but the first one to offer accelarated (and stable) 3D on OS X is going to get my money; that’ll let me dump my XP box, which will be cause for celebration.
– chrish