Hi, I am a heavy user of virtualization in my private zoo of systems. My main Operating System is Debian, and I am running a multitude of other Linuxen inside KVM, and also a handful of Windows systems that are still using VirtualBox. However, VirtualBox has losing attractivity since there are issues that prevent current VirtualBox from being packaged for Debian (VirtualBox 4.2 needing the non-free OpenWatcom compiler to build), and the latest VirtualBox in Debian (4.1.18) does not build its kernel module with Linux 3.7. I would therefore like to migrate my Windows guests to KVM as well. Judging from what one finds on the net, this is possible thanks to Fedora/Red Hat's work on virtio-win, which has not been updated since july 2012. The documentation on http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers has also not been touched in a while. I proceeded to do a test install of Windows 7 in a KVM VM which only worked after configuring a second virtual CD-ROM drive and giving the Windows 7 installer access to the virtio-win.iso from the very beginning (the dreaded F6 option). If it's important, the VM is configured with libvirt 0.9.15, has two virtual cores off a Core i7 Quad Core host and 2 Gigs of RAM. libvirt's Virtual Machine Manager is used to get access to the VM's graphics console. After the install and the resulting patch orgy finished, I noticed that the KVM-based Windows install was running much slower than an existing Windows 7 guest running under VirtualBox (on the same hardware and a similiarly configured VM), which is odd since sparkling new Windows installs usually tend to run much better than an install that has been used for months. A few benchmarks showed that the KVM-based Windows suffers from I/O performance that is almost an order of magnitude slower than the one running based on VirtualBox. I would like to know whether I did something wrong, or if there is another way to achieve compareable I/O performance in a Windows VM on KVM than it is reachable with a trivial VirtualBox installation. On another point: The VirtualBox graphics drivers for Windows have an option to couple the Windows desktop size to the size of the guest Window. That is, when I resize the X11 Window that shows the VM desktop, the desktop is automatically resized to fill the window completely. On KVM, I understand that the canonical way to run Windows in a VM is to use the graphics drivers from VMWare as the graphics card emulated by qemu-kvm is VMWare compatible. But it looks like this doesn't work since Windows claims to have a "Standard VGA graphics adapter" which is rather slow and only offers a list of standard screen resolutions which also does not adapt to window size. I guess this is an issue that I better address on a LibVirt mailing list, right? I would appreciate any comments, and - if appropriate - pointers to other mailing lists that may help with getting Windows 7 to run better under KVM. Greetings Marc -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things." Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 31958061 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 621 31958062 -- 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
