Qemu vs VMWare

[David Timms]

On 10/26/2009 08:05 AM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> I wish to share my first hands-on experience with qemu, compare it to vmware
> player, and (since I'm highly disappointed with the performance difference) ask
> is there anything that can be done configuration-wise to improve the user
> experience under qemu.
For comparison, try yum install akmod-VirtualBox-OSE from rpm fusion.

> (1) Windows XP guest under qemu appears to be an order-of-magnitude slower
> than equivalent vmware guest. I haven't measured precisely, but by counting
> the seconds for the same operation (open a window or such), qemu appears to be
> roughly 10 times slower! Why is it *that* bad?
Usually the guest is improved by running a vm specific set of tools, eg 
that does mouse/keyboard/clipboard/network share/clock/timing 
improvements under that particular vm host

Did you install that guest from scratch ?

> (2) When resizing the guest console window, qemu rescales the guest output,
> while vmware resizes guest screen resolution to match the window size. The
> latter looks far more pretty.
Part of tools. If you don't have vmware-tools installed, you don't get 
this. Probably similar for qemu ?

...
> Also, I think I should mention that my processor does not have the vmx bit, I
> have no option in the host bios to enable it, so I guess both qemu and vmware
> work in all-software emulation. But that doesn't explain such a big difference
> in performance. Btw, this is all on Intel Core 2 Duo 1.5 GHz, 2GB of ram, each
> guest has one processor and 512 MB ram allocated. They don't run
> simultaneously, of course. I didn't notice any memory swapping activity.
cat /proc/cpuinfo
will tell you what to your CPU and kernel combination has.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#Hardware_support
I would be surprised if the duo doesn't have vt support.

DaveT.