On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 6:42 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt <t...@mittelstaedt.us>wrote:
> The practical reality of it is I can go out and buy a brand new, super-fast > computer and run FreeBSD 8 on it then VirtualBox on that, > then my guest OS's under VirtualBox - and get the same performance > as a bare-metal hypervisor like ESXi or Luvalley on older hardware. > And, with the FreeBSD/VirtualBox way, I get access to a far wider array > of hardware including disk RAID hardware. > Now days, there is very little, if any difference in guest speed(cpu based operations) in either type 1 or 2 hypervisors. Both types basically let the code run directly on the cpu, except they aren't allowed to touch ring 0. I was having a great of difficulty a few months ago with virtualization debian host I had set up. One of the Windows guests saw some high peak in network traffic which caused various issues which the virtio drivers didn't resolve. With it being a file server among other things, the flakiness had to be resolved. The physical box was a recent Dell Xeon with pair of broadcom and intel nics and the orginal hypervisor I used was KVM. The one in Debian's repository at the time was somewhat old, but that's what the client originally requested. Since this setup didn't work, I moved it over to the current proprietary version of Virtualbox which did better, but not satifactory because issues were still present. Finally, I moved it to Xen 4 because I knew it had pci-pass-through support and those broadcoms were sitting there doing nothing. The pci-pass-through of the broadcoms to the Windows guest works great. I haven't had another problem with the box. So the point of my story is that I think a modern KVM is just as fast and featureful as Xen since they both have pci-pass-through and you should expect the same(roughly) performance on your guests withever recent hypervisor you choose. Virtualbox is fast too, maybe even a bit faster than KVM but until it gets pci-pass-through it won't be as feature complete as the others. I think the luvalley approach is quite innovative and interesting, but honestly the main reason for my inquiry into it is that IMO it's only a matter of time till Oracle decides they need to make money from Vbox, and I don't want to see FreeBSD lose this technology which has been such a boon for me and many others. kqemu is only good for so much ;) -- Adam Vande More _______________________________________________ freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-emulation To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-emulation-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
