FC10, Virtualization , Windows XP

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 18:48 -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> M A Young wrote:
> > On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Tom Horsley wrote:
> > 
> >> On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:09:04 -0500
> >> Jim wrote:
> >>
> >>> FC 10/KDE
> >>> what is the best Virtualization program for FC10, to run Windows XP in.
> >>> I understand because my AMD Athlon doesn't have a "svm" feature I can't
> >>> run KVM, and VM Ware is slow ?
> >>
> >> Anything you use will be slow without the hardware virtualization
> >> support - they all have the same problem.
> > 
> > But they aren't all as slow as vmware, nor is hardware virtualization 
> > required for a faster solution, for example Xen does very well without 
> > needing hardware support. However, due to the current development stage, 
> > xen isn't a practical solution for Fedora 10 (upstream development is 
> > usable is some circumstances but yet suitable for a wider audience), but 
> > might be ready during the lifetime of Fedora 11, or for Fedora 12.
> > 
> Linux can run paravirtualized, but XP not so much. A general problem, which is 
> why the hardware virtual is helpful. Doesn't seem to help some things, though, 
> the last I checked Avi told me that Win98SE did some stuff in real mode which 
> kvm can't catch, I think VMware does, I believe I ran VMware on a 2.4 kernel 
> "back when."
> 
> My guess is that qemu is about as good as the others, give or take 20%. I 
> actually installed FC10 x86_64 on qemu, although it was... leisurely. Something 
> to try, at least.

On this kind of hardware, you are likely to find that VMware Workstation
is the fastest of all of the above alternatives. KVM / QEMU / Xen all
require hardware virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V) to run optimally.
VMware was around long before this hardware feature was available -
that's part of how and why they were as successful as they were. They
are still by far the fastest in this hardware as well.

In addition, you will find that VMware is faster when it comes to
supporting older operating systems in VMs because the older ones do not
have the hooks in them to understand and leverage paravirtualization
calls. KVM and especially the Xen derivatives just don't handle this as
well - if at all.

I would challenge the person as saying VMware was slow - especially in
this regard is misinformed at best.

Cheers,

Chris


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