Anybody play with kernel virtual machines yet? (screenshot)

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Bones

[H]ard|Gawd
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Anybody have any experiences with the new KVM stuff going into the 2.6.20 kernel? I just put together a new Core 2 box to play with it. The performance and stability is good. I did some SuperPi runs on standard Qemu and KVM under Windows 2000, and KVM showed a 940% speed advantage over standard Qemu. Photoshop is actually very usable with KVM.

Seems that there is a bug in real mode emulation somewhere, because Win98 won't boot - need to use standard Qemu for that. ACPI emulation is completely hosed. Besides that, it works great :p

I may try out Xen again in the near future. I didn't have a VT enabled processor until just now, so I was running paravirtualized Linux with it.

Here's Windows XP, Windows 98, WIndows 2000, and the Knoppix LiveCD running in virtual machines:
vmarraysmall.jpg
 
no, but I'll have to check that out for sure.

What would be really sweet is if you could map a virtual images device to a real one. You could have a linux computer running windows in a virtual environment, but appearing to an end user as just another linux box. Then if you had that setup across a large office, you'd have a bunch of linux boxes you could ssh into and use their cpu time for various tasks of your choosing.
 
Whatsisname said:
no, but I'll have to check that out for sure.

What would be really sweet is if you could map a virtual images device to a real one. You could have a linux computer running windows in a virtual environment, but appearing to an end user as just another linux box. Then if you had that setup across a large office, you'd have a bunch of linux boxes you could ssh into and use their cpu time for various tasks of your choosing.
Click to expand...

I think what you are after is a Xen enabled Kernel accessing the KVM, then using a very basic system (ie just for a console) have it spawn instances of a VM that you want
 
Just for kicks, I put Starcraft on the Win2k virtual machine. It plays very slowly using the KVM module, but it is perfectly fine in standard QEMU non-accelerated mode. Wonder what is going wrong with KVM here... Starcraft is not a very demanding game, so I wouldn't expect to see any difference between the two.
 
As I Lay Dying said:
looks great, but alas my skt 939 does not contain the necessary virtualization tech.
Click to expand...

Niether did mine. That gave me the perfect excuse to build a Core 2 box :D

KVM seems to have a real problem with anything graphical. Graphics mode changes are slow, and anything requiring a whole screen redraw takes ages compared to no-KVM mode.
 
qemu is just used as a control console for KVM. KVM, is more like VMware's ESX server in that the OS (in this case Linux) is acting as a true hypervisor.
 
ahhh I see, I am actually looking at xen from some of the benchmarks that I see it seems that it quite fast......
 
I have tried KVM yet but I'm currently working on a Xen project for work and I have a few years experience with linux-vserver and Virtuozzo, Xen kicks both their asses.

Here's some screenshots of a bunch of Windows VMs running on Xen 3.0.3.

windows.jpg


windows2.jpg


The nice thing about Xen is you don't even have to start X to run Windows machines, you can connect to them over VNC.
 
Nice screenies. I used VNC also to connect to some of the Linux VMs I had set up.

How is Xen's stability now in 3.0.3? It frequently hard locked my test machine during kernel compiles while running paravirtualized Linux, using 3.0.2. I'll probably wait until 3.0.4 in any case to try it out again, though. From reading the developer's mailing list, 3.0.4 was apparently released a couple weeks ago. The front page still says 3.0.3, so either they are lazy about updating it or it wasn't really released due to some problems :rolleyes:
 
3.0.4 is on the download page, they just haven't updated the front page yet.

From all the testing I've done Xen is very stable, and it actually keeps each domU seperated. I ran a fork bomb on one of my domUs today and it crashed the VM, load went to over 700 while the rest of my domUs are still at 0.

I've also had one account running seti@home for a while and it doesn't phase anything else.
 
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