Hi everyone! :-) 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. Basically, my motivation to try out qemu in the first place is the not-so-great support from vmware when it comes to kernel modules, updating Fedora etc. The idea is to make all these issues go away by going with the open source solution for virtualization. Naively, I expected more or less equivalent performance and/or set of features. But qemu turned out to be a very big disappointment: (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? (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. (3) There is no transparent clipboard usability (copy-paste) between host and guest in qemu. (4) Set of supported hardware for guest is smaller in qemu (no bluetooth, no webcam, ...). (5) There is no equivalent of the "unity" display of guest windows on the host desktops, which works so beautifully in vmware, even more so if Compiz effects are enabled on the host. There are a few more minor quirks (selinux complaints, failure to shutdown guest properly, etc.), but I can live with those, so I won't complain. But the above five issues, (1) and (3) being most severe, are showstoppers. So my questions are: * did I miss something obvious to configure, read the docs or whatever, so I'm not aware that qemu can work better? * I am used to think that typically open-source solution of something is more powerful than any proprietary solution of the same thing, but in this case (virtualization) it seems to be the other way around. Why? I doubt that open- source developers are incompetent to deliver equivalent functionality, so what is the problem here? Patented solutions, maybe? I mean, host-guest copy/paste is an obvious useful thing to have, for example... I am not trying to bitch about qemu being so bad, but am rather genuinely interested in understanding why. 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. I would appreciate if someone sheds some light for me on this. I would prefer to use qemu (it being open-source), but it performs so much worse that I have to fallback to vmware for now. Ideas? Opinions? Advice? TIA, :-) Marko -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
