2009/9/24 Yan Vugenfirer <yvugenfi@xxxxxxxxxx>: > Hello All, > > I am happy to announce that the Windows guest drivers binaries are > released. Thank you, I've been waiting for this for quite a while :) I've done some benchmarking with the drivers on Windows XP SP3 32bit, but it seems like using the VirtIO drivers are slower than the IDE drivers in (almost) all cases. Perhaps I've missed something or does the driver still need optimization? I created two raw images of 5GB and attached them to a WinXP SP3 virtual machine with: "-drive file=virtio.img,if=virtio -drive file=ide.img,if=ide" I installed the VirtIO drivers, rebooted, formatted the new virtual HDDs with NTFS and downloaded IOMeter. Three different test were run; database workload ("Default" in IOmeter), maximum read throughput and maximum write throughput (settings taken from IOmeter documentation). All results are the average of two individual runs of the test. Each test ran for 3 minutes. -- Typical database workload ("default" in Iometer: 2kb, 67% read, 33% write, 100% random, 0% sequential) -- Total I/Os per sec: IDE: 86,67 VirtIO: 66,84 Total MBs per second: IDE: 0,17MB/sec VirtIO: 0,13MB/sec Average I/O response time: IDE: 11,59ms VirtIO: 14,96ms Maximum I/O response time: IDE: 177,06ms VirtIO: 244,52ms % CPU Utilization: IDE: 3,15% VirtIO: 2,55% -- Maximum reading throughput (64kb, 100% read, 0% write, 0% random, 100% sequential) -- Total I/Os per sec: IDE: 3266,17 VirtIO: 2694,34 Total MBs per second: IDE: 204,14MB/sec VirtIO: 168,40MB/sec Average I/O response time: IDE: 0,3053ms VirtIO: 0,3710ms Maximum I/O response time: IDE: 210,60ms VirtIO: 180,65ms % CPU Utilization: IDE: 70,4% VirtIO: 55,66% -- Maximum writing throughput (64kb, 0% read, 100% write, 0% random, 100% sequential) -- Total I/Os per sec: IDE: 258,92 VirtIO: 123,69 Total MBs per second: IDE: 16,18MB/sec VirtIO: 7,74MB/sec Average I/O response time: IDE: 3,89ms VirtIO: 8,17ms Maximum I/O response time: IDE: 241,99ms VirtIO: 838,19ms % CPU Utilization: IDE: 8,21% VirtIO: 4,88% This was tested on a Arch Linux host with kernel 2.6.30.6 64bit and kvm-88. One CPU and 2GB of RAM was assigned to the virtual machine. Is this expected behaviour? Thanks again for your effort on the VirtIO drivers :) Best Regards Kenni Lund -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html