If your processor supports VT-d or IOMMU you can do this with Xen and SATA passthrough. Without VT-d or IOMMU you cannot virtually isolate hardware though. Essentially this configuration allows you to have multiple virtual machines that have direct access to (different) hardware, and to lock a specific piece of hardware to a specific virtual machine (so that even the host OS doesn't have access to the hardware anymore). I imagine this is what you meant and not something like dual booting right? PS: You can even game on a Windows VM with almost no performance penalty if you PCI passthrough a graphics card to a windows guest. I don't think it is 100% perfect though, because there are theoretical attacks where the attacker, for example, reflashes your video card in such a way that it attacks your system during the boot sequence. But it is 99% perfect .