The closest you'll come is to use dual boot and hibernate each system when switching, but you won't be able to see the discs mounted to the other OS, and there will be a delay during the switch. A VM will give you a faster switch, but with the performance costs you have already noted.

Get a second video card and do PCI passthrough on the VM.

@IgnacioVazquez-Abrams sounds like an answer to me- why not write that up?

@Ignacio, interesting! As a matter of fact, I have two Nvidia 1080ti video cards currently installed. How would you set up PCI passthrough and which Virtual Machine supports this?

@Ignacio, Sadly, you need VT-d for this which my CPU does not support (i7-2600k) and an IOMMU motherboard, which I also do not have. I will have to explore another option.

related: askubuntu.com/questions/59943/…

Think this is only possible on some dual socket cpu motherboards!?!

Wait - you have two 1080 Ti cards, and they're being paired with a 7-year-old Sandy Bridge processor? But that aside - I run Windows 10 as my host OS and through VMWare Player I run a Fedora installation, each one gets 16GB of RAM, and things are super smooth. I think you'll find the performance hit of a VM guest these days is in the single digits, percentage-wise, versus running as a host.

Even with your old processor, using virtualization such as VMWare or QEMU+KVM provides plenty fast virtualization apart from graphics, well fast enough to do e.g. cross platform development. With PCI Passthrough with KVM you can make the graphics work just as fast. It's great.

@PowerDeveloper I think the best option would be to use a remote desktop for your Linux installation. Host a Linux VM on a server or in the cloud somewhere and just remote-desktop in when you need to do Linux Development. If this is an option, please say so, then I can make an answer going into more detail for this solution.

this question made me think of this

Should both OSes share the same harddrive?

I've done something vaugely like this simply by hibernating both operating systems. Hibernating one and resuming the other isn't instant, but with a fast ssd it may be tolerable.

Check out lime-technology.com/wp/7-gamers-in-1-tower-behind-the-scenes

@PowerDeveloper why don't you get a better machine that can run two virtualized OSes at the performance level that you require?

I think yesterday's xkcd is perfect here...

Everyone's desire to find an alternative solution for you is awesome, however it's worth noting that the ideal situation you're looking for is simply impossible with currently implementations of Linux, Windows, and hardware. Assuming you could easily dump and restore RAM, CPU registers, etc. and switch, the OSes would still need to be capable of that (and restoring from it) and you'd need some sort of hypervisor to manage the handoff. It also wouldn't be as quick as you want unless you had redundant hardware, at which point it's better to just use two machines.

"This hurts the performance of the hosted OS significantly, especially for graphics" FWIW, I don't actually find that. Though it'll depend what you're doing obviously.

I run an old 2007 imac, two linux desktops and a windows tablet all side by side with Synergy. It works superlatively well symless.com/synergy I also use an audio mixer so all machines make sound with one set of speakers.

@FlimbusAkimbo: it isn't impossible. It exists and is in operation in my office.