I have been trying to get a pleasant VM environment on a laptop. The original goal was to set something up in limited space on a Lenovo T400 laptop.
I was tearing my hair out when I found that my VM build of VPP was taking much longer than a build on the base machine. The processor is Core 2 Duo, and therefore it has all the Intel VT-x virtualization hardware needed for KVM which I am using (it also has all the interesting extensions like SSSE3 for DPDK, even though it is older than my AMD processor.) I read that the VM should execute code almost as fast as native. After hours of building VPP with all sorts of tweaks in # of processors assigned to the VM, memory assigned, and even the -j argument to make controlled in build-root/Makefile, I was having no luck. It finally dawned on me that I had not controlled the version of gcc used. My VM is CentOS 7, and my host is Ubuntu Server 16.10. CentOS has gcc 4.8, and Ubuntu has gcc 6. So I re-ran my tests just using the host. I ignored gcc 6 this time, but I compared gcc 4.8.5 to gcc 5.4.1. Here are the results of "make build-release": gcc 4.8.5 Thu Mar 16 10:14:45 EDT 2017 start Thu Mar 16 10:47:04 EDT 2017 stop gcc 5.4.1 Thu Mar 16 10:59:03 EDT 2017 start Thu Mar 16 11:17:54 EDT 2017 stop I will give the VM speed worry a rest. Now I am looking for advice about VM graphics, and I put the question out here, since some folks are likely using VMs. I ran into issues with the guest graphics being blurry, and my glasses aren't perfect, and my eyes aren't perfect, but there was no doubt that the graphics really sucked. This is largely related to resizing windows. So if you shrink a virt-viewer window, the text font shrinks rather than what we are used to when resizing a terminal window. That is one example. Here is a procedure that works nicely, but requires some security reductions, while bringing the X-Windows behavior back to what we remember from the 1990s. Note that I started off with a non-graphical Ubuntu Server, and then tried adding just enough to get graphics. At the moment I have the olvwm window manager, which I understand is similar to the first time I used X on a Sun Workstation. I was working in a lab where about 20 people were seated at tables with Sun monitors. I had never used a graphics terminal before. My soon to be friend John Stanford White would walk around the lab every day and he would see a bunch of people with Sun Windows on their screens, except for one guy who had just one large text display covering the entire CRT. But I digress... I start Ubuntu Server and it comes up in text mode. I may start my VM at this time with $sudo chown burt /etc/libvirt/qemu/centos7.xml #one time operation $virsh create /etc/libvirt/qemu/centos7.xml I can next $startx or else $sudo xinit #bug requiring sudo also solved using "xinit -- vt*n" *(often "xinit --vt1") but this is the sticky point -- I had to change /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc (for startx) or ~/.xserverrc (for xinit) to change the option "-nolisten tcp" to "listen tcp". So my technique requires me to revert to an insecure mode. This is why I am asking if anybody knows how to get the same quality graphics without this. (I am looking for a geek solution rather than a smart person solution, so I am not using VirtualBox.) Next thing I do from a terminal on the graphics desktop is $ xhost + #or I can add -ac to my .xserverrc, I'll assume that below Following that I $ssh burt@192.168.122.178 after my VM is up, and then from my VM after logging in to it I can either 1) $ export DISPLAY=192.168.122.1:0; gnome-terminal [note that gnome-terminal --display=192.168.122.1:0 does not work as advertised for me] or if I had not done startx but rather I had done xinit 2) $ gnome-shell -d 192.168.122.1:0 and then I get a very nice full screen CentOS desktop, with no blurry graphics. It is also possible to use $Xorg vt1 -ac -listen tcp. In this case I do Ctrl-Alt-F3 and log into the host and then Ctrl-Alt-F2 and ssh to burt@192.168.122.178 2) $export DISPLAY=192.168.122.1:0; gnome-shell #or like I did 2) earlier but it may lock up the whole box so perhaps best to stick with xinit rather than Xorg. Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is not working on my system to help get out of a jam. Only the 1/0 key (power) works after lock up. So I have been reading about the Spice protocol, and how Spice does everything, and is better than VNC, yada yada yada. However, I have not found a shred of usable documentation. Perhaps if I had 2 Fedora machines, host and VM, rather than Ubuntu and CentOS, I would have better luck. So everything I have written about displaying machines above comes about because the only Spice client I found works like total dog poop. Therefore, my findings should be useful for anybody not using Virtualbox or VMWare. Any workable practical Spice help is appreciated. Burt
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