Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2011 20:51:43 -0600 From: Adam Vande More <amvandemore@gmail.com> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@mittelstaedt.us> Cc: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Testing Luvalley with FreeBSD as dom0 Message-ID: <AANLkTim0cfNkEEq7daR=iCD1kaKTpqBdMXavLZoJP3ri@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4D2A55F4.6010704@mittelstaedt.us> References: <20100418191752.GA72730@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <w2r3b0605b31004181554tb90de59u6df8ebd5b1206caa@mail.gmail.com> <AANLkTi=nhk%2BeCG6kbe4LfeaTQWkKaVcr%2BRx2LrKparDO@mail.gmail.com> <20110107194516.GA28544@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <AANLkTikvP8SezKEZYSUimaj3u8fkk2Vw6-aY09KV=RF3@mail.gmail.com> <20110107213643.GA32645@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <AANLkTi=2Nn8xeKudxb2uSR=aLx0GW43gVPCdL-=hjP7z@mail.gmail.com> <AANLkTikbuWJbtPYaLW=8BEH4f5oiumzEN6rgwOB5tC=R@mail.gmail.com> <20110109110022.GA10789@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <AANLkTik9Ckh2UAaed=YYbBFCP6yyd6kOmSXdEYmZPiEd@mail.gmail.com> <4D2A55F4.6010704@mittelstaedt.us>
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On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 6:42 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@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
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