Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 23:02:43 -1000 (HST) From: Vincent Poy <vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET> To: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> Cc: <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: vmware on freebsd for fast booting for devel. Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.31.0104242301000.4422-100000@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET> In-Reply-To: <15078.13416.797304.246030@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>
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On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Andrew Gallatin wrote: > Vincent Poy writes: > > Speaking about vmware, how much of the performance is a vm > > supposed to give compared to the actual processor in a stand-alone > > machine? > > It depends on what metric one uses to measure performance. Boots > (loading kernel) with a graphics console are painfully slow, like > 5-10% of native speed. CPU bound programs run at near-native speeds. > I/O bound jobs are much slower. > > Memory is a very important factor -- 128MB or less is too little to > run VMware at a reasonable speed. And to conserve memory, it really > helps to use a "plain" disk rather than using a disk file. This > entails vmware doing I/O to a raw disk partition rather than to a file > and reduces memory use by eliminating double caching of data by the > host and guest OSes. > > FWIW, my old 300MHz PII (128MB ram, disk file) was nearly unusable. > My wife's 400MHz laptop (192MB ram, plain disk) is fairly decent. My > new 1.2GHz Tbird (1GB ram, plain disk) feels quite fast. This is for > my workload, which is typically an occasional boot into Windows. Interesting. What happens if it's like the reverse where one runs FreeBSD under vmware from Windows2000? Since 5-10% seems to be really slow. Cheers, Vince - vince@WURLDLINK.NET - Vice President ________ __ ____ Unix Networking Operations - FreeBSD-Real Unix for Free / / / / | / |[__ ] WurldLink Corporation / / / / | / | __] ] San Francisco - Honolulu - Hong Kong / / / / / |/ / | __] ] HongKong Stars/Gravis UltraSound Mailing Lists Admin /_/_/_/_/|___/|_|[____] Almighty1@IRC - oahu.DAL.NET Hawaii's DALnet IRC Network Server Admin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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