Brad Campbell wrote: > > > Sean Craig - enigmatis wrote: >> Hi, >> >> Has anybody on this list run VMWare and VirtualBox? I've (played with >> and) used VMWare since around 2000 - their earliest stuff, and find it >> quite a good product. However I do find it a bit heavy on my machine. >> That might not be so much a problem right now since I've got a lot more >> memory..... >> >> Why would I move to VirtualBox? > > Speed I believe is the main reason. Apparently virtualbox uses all sorts > of guest specific tricks > and techniques to reduce the number of required system calls and context > switches. I tried VMWare > and WinXP on this box and found it a bit quicker than Qemu, but not > quick enough to justify the > buggering about I had to do to get it installed/running, so I went back > to Qemu. > > Virtualbox is just *loads* faster subjectively. > > VMWare is solid and has been around for years. These guys seem a bit > newer on the block, but they > have some stunning ideas on how to speed up virtualisation that nobody > else seems to be doing yet.
Too many syscalls will flush the TLB cache and the benefits of caching is lost. But in most cases, rather than a slight performance gain, reliability and functionality are more important aspects at least for me. On multi core CPU's you won't see the cache flush happening so often and hence doesn't make much of a difference compared to usability.
