From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Apr 25 2: 2:56 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from oahu.WURLDLINK.NET (oahu.WURLDLINK.NET [216.235.52.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E067337B42C for ; Wed, 25 Apr 2001 02:02:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET) Received: from localhost (vince@localhost) by oahu.WURLDLINK.NET (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA49778; Tue, 24 Apr 2001 23:02:44 -1000 (HST) (envelope-from vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 23:02:43 -1000 (HST) From: Vincent Poy To: Andrew Gallatin Cc: Subject: Re: vmware on freebsd for fast booting for devel. In-Reply-To: <15078.13416.797304.246030@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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