[ sorry 'bout the latency.  this got buried, unfortunately. ]

On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 22:23 +0100, Frank Mehnert wrote:
> Hi Brian,

Hi Frank,

> On Sunday 08 March 2009, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> > >  * Check the disk settings in the guest: Does the guest drive the
> > >    hard disk in DMA mode or PIO mode?
> >
> > Hrm.  How do I determine that from Windows XP?
> 
> Open the device manager and right click on the IDE controller
> channel 0. You should find a page where the transfer mode is
> shown.

OK.  Right-clicked IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers->Primary IDE Channel.  In
Advanced Settings there are boxes for Device 0 and Device 1.  Both are
set to Transfer Mode: DMA if available and Device 0 says Current
Transfer Mode: Multi-Word DMA Mode 2.

> >
> > The Session  Information shows:
> > DMA Transfers 492,884
> > PIO Transfers 59,770
> > Data Read     5,062,400,000 B
> > Data Written  2,773,438,000B
> 
> Hmm, som PIO transfers but much more DMA transfers. I assume the
> count of the PIO transfers does not increases during the benchmark,
> does it?

Before benchmark:

DMA Transfers: 258,713
PIO Transfers: 32,462

After:

DMA Transfers: 275,468
PIO Transfers: 32,990

> VBox should definitely make use of multiple cores. Although it supports
> only one guest CPU, intensive I/O will benefit from multiple cores as
> most devices have dedicated worker threads.

Just as I would have thought.

> When is one CPU pegged at 100%?

Using top, I can only see the "%" of CPU being used as a total of both
cores.  Virtualbox runs with ~100% (which correlates to a single core)
all of the time, not just when running a disk benchmark.

> The whole time or only during the benchmark?

Whole time.  I'm just chasing down this disk benchmark avenue at
somebody's suggestion that guest disk i/o might be what is causing all
of the CPU use of a VM.

Cheers,
b.

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