Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 22:20:24 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> To: Vincent Poy <vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET> Cc: <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: vmware on freebsd for fast booting for devel. Message-ID: <15078.13416.797304.246030@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.31.0104241201330.4422-100000@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET> References: <15077.63351.26014.849385@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> <Pine.BSF.4.31.0104241201330.4422-100000@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET>
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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. Drew ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andrew Gallatin, Sr Systems Programmer http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin Duke University Email: gallatin@cs.duke.edu Department of Computer Science Phone: (919) 660-6590 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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