On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 12:55 AM, Huihong Luo <[email protected]> wrote: > The Feburary "Linux Format" magizine has a cover story "Virtualize Now". It > goes recommending VirtualBox due to the many features from vbox. However, it > has one sentence saying VirtualBox is about 50% of KVM's performance. > > How could it be possible? considering the similar artichetures (both are > using a kernel driver inside host OS). Is that the case if comparing vbox > without enabling hardware VT to KVM (which works only on VT)? > > Any thoughts?
Well, it really depends on the case... It can be true for heavy IO workloads. KVM has virtIO network and virtIO hard disk. (read: paravirtualization) KVM's virtIO network can beat 1 Gbp/s. Plus KVM supports SMP guests. VirtualBox on the other hand has paravirtualization in the video hardware department (VirtualBox Graphics Adapter) - so for graphics VirtualBox is a lot faster. It supports DirectDraw + OpenGL acceleration. For UP CPU performance they are about the same. In most cases performance is comparable. One can only wonder why the Open-Source world has so many virtualizers: KVM, Xen, QVM, KQemu, VirtualBox, plus emulators Qemu and Bosch. The fact is: all of them share portions of code -- Bochs BIOS, plus many PC hardware devices. As far as I am concerned - I would like to see bigger portions of code shared. (i.e. submitted back to Qemu, and vice-versa) -- -Alexey Eromenko "Technologov", 14.2.2009 _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
