I will second this performance observation. After the latest round of pathces, I too found that my Windows XP VM was performing much faster than before and consuming much less cpu time. I then observed that my Fe-11 VM was performing considerably slower. Sure enough, I have checked my hda for each VM and the Windows was using native IDE and FE-11 was using virtio. I have now changed my FE-11 hda to IDE. Seems to exhibit much more pep! So much for paravirtualization. Paul <div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 3:50 PM, Dale Bewley <<a href="mailto:dlbewley@lib.ucdavis.edu">dlbewley@lib.ucdavis.edu</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I assumed the virtio block driver to be faster for a kvm guest than ide, but I'm seeing quite the opposite. Is this expected? I normally create guests with a wrapper script around virt-install which creates guests configured to use IDE disks: f11-db1.xml- <emulator>/usr/bin/qemu-kvm</emulator> f11-db1.xml: <disk type='file' device='disk'> f11-db1.xml- <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images//f11-db1.img'/> f11-db1.xml- <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/> f11-db1.xml: </disk> I am currently creating a guest with the virt-manager wizard which apparently uses virtio by default: f11-archivist.xml- <emulator>/usr/bin/qemu-kvm</emulator> f11-archivist.xml: <disk type='file' device='disk'> f11-archivist.xml- <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images//f11-archivist.img'/> f11-archivist.xml- <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/> f11-archivist.xml: </disk> The filesystem formatting and installation are going very very slowly. Host is 2.6.29.6-213.fc11.x86_64 4x quad core. Guests are also fc11 x86_64. BTW, I've updated to virt-manager-0.7.0-7, libvirt-0.6.2-18, qemu-kvm-0.10.6-6, and kernel-2.6.30.8-64 just before creating this guest but have not restarted libvirtd or rebooted the host. -- Dale Bewley - Unix Administrator - Shields Library - UC Davis GPG: 0xB098A0F3 0D5A 9AEB 43F4 F84C 7EFD 1753 064D 2583 B098 A0F3 _______________________________________________ Fedora-virt mailing list <a href="mailto:Fedora-virt@redhat.com">Fedora-virt@redhat.com</a> <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-virt" target="_blank">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-virt</a> </blockquote></div>