Hardware Virtualization Slower Than Software? 197
Jim Buzbee writes "Those you keeping up with the latest virtualization techniques being offered by both Intel and AMD will be interested in a new white paper by VMWare that comes to the surprising conclusion that hardware-assisted x86 virtualization oftentimes fails to outperform software-assisted virtualization. My reading of the paper says that this counterintuitive result is often due to the fact that hardware-assisted virtualization relies on expensive traps to catch privileged instructions while software-assisted virtualization uses inexpensive software substitutions. One example given is compilation of a Linux kernel under a virtualized Linux OS. Native wall-clock time: 265 seconds. Software-assisted virtualization: 393 seconds. Hardware-assisted virtualization: 484 seconds. Ouch. It sounds to me like a hybrid approach may be the best answer to the virtualization problem.
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