I'm using Parallels to work through the LFS (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) books, using the LFS live CD. So far (I'm at chapter 6) everything has been going smooth. I did however notice a few oddities/issues. 1. The first time I booted with the Live CD, I let the system stay on for about 24 hours (without ever suspending it). Initially, the guest and host OS's clocks were synchronized. Just before I shut down the guest I noticed the clock had lagged a good one and a half hours behind the host's clock. Even if you could expect some dissynchronization, that seems a bit excessive. 2. cat /proc/cpuinfo reports the CPU speed as 374811.702 MHz. Where does this strange value come from? Is it reported by Parallel's BIOS? Wouldn't it be more sensible to report something that more closely matches the host's CPU speed? The model is reported as "Celeron-A". 3. Just after resuming the system from a suspended state, the cursor will blink madly for a while, as if some internal clock had sped up, and freeze in short intervals. After some 10 seconds, things will become stable, and everything will work as normal. 4. Parallels uses lots of memory while running the system (in this case the Live CD system), even when just idling at the prompt. The top utility reports, PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE 481 Parallels 29.0% 19:02.28 17 177 411 9.71M 574M 340M 1002M The VM uses the "Other Linux 2.6 Kernel" setting and has 512 MiB of memory. Other than that, everything has been working perfectly. I recommend Parallels to anyone who wants to try out LFS for the learning experience in a as non-intrusive way as possible. /Ulf Magnusson
