On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Bill Oliver <[email protected]> wrote: > Is VirtualBox really significantly slower? > > Bummer. It was so easy to set up, too. How much performance am I losing?
It's slower on disk I/O. On most CPU/RAM operations it's not much different than a natively running OS. The same is true for Xen. The difference is that because Xen uses a specialized kernel for the guest OS, it's much more performant for disk I/O and caching. > Basically, I have an app that requires RH Enterprise, so I run CentOS on my > Mandriva box using VirtualBox. It's a visualization program, and I noticed > that some of the volume rendering was a little slow, but I assumed that was > due to my processor, and not to my virtualizaton... Graphics acceleration for guest OSes is still in a state of terribleness. The only one that I've seen that doesn't look like a massive tub of fail is VMWare Fusion 3. Fusion 2 was OK, and Fusion 1 had OK graphics acceleration, but it was still new and quite buggy. I don't pay too much attention to Parallels desktop simply because past hosting experience with Parallels tech has convinced me that their ability to access disk resources is slow. VirtualBox does have some 3D acceleration, though I haven't used it much. It's probably unstable and I wouldn't suggest it on a Linux host. Linux GFX drivers are fail, and will crash just as soon as look at you. GFX drivers on Windows and Mac OS X are less fail (but still pretty terrible). I wholly recommend that you try enabling 3D acceleration, but don't be surprised if X11 locks up or your machine does a hard reset. -- Registered Linux Addict #431495 For Faith and Family! | John 3:16! fsdev.net | 0x5f3759df.org | chrismiller.at -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup
