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Is it possible to switch between different Linux distributions without restarting? For example I've installed Ubuntu and Arch Linux multi-boot. And I want to switch between them without restarting my computer.

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    No, not possible.
    – user772515
    Oct 8, 2017 at 20:49
  • Why do you want to do that... If it's to run a few specific apps, have you looked at containers?
    – xenoid
    Oct 9, 2017 at 7:54

3 Answers 3

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It is technically possible, but not neccessarily practical.

The "cheat" way to do this would to run each distro in a VM, and switch between VMs. Most testers would use a variant of this.

It might be technically possible to create a chroot jail and set up a second distro in a directory of the primary OS and then "pivot" to it and restart apps, but this would be messy and cause residual issues, and assumes compatible kernels and fairly in-depth knowledge of everything. (I note that Crouton uses this technology to run Ubuntu in a Chromebook, so its doable in theory)

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Yes you can, using VMs. I have dont the following in one direction, booting Windows, then loading Mint from another hard drive into a VM. Using VirtualBox and its raw disk option you should be able to boot one OS inside the other. I dont see why you cant do it the other way around as well, booting from the second OS and launching a VM of the first OS. However, it might take some work.

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It is actually very possible, using kexec. I have not tried it myself, but look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kexec.

As it states: "Kexec is a system call that enables you to load and boot into another kernel from the currently running kernel. This is useful for kernel developers or other people who need to reboot very quickly without waiting for the whole BIOS boot process to finish"

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