Anybody familiar with VMWare tuning?

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tuesday 22 January 2008 03:13:32 pm Bill McGonigle wrote:
> On Jan 22, 2008, at 13:29, Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote:
> > * Do you have a CPU with virtualization extensions?
>
> Yes, this is what I was going to ask as well.  Issue:
>
>    cat /proc/cpuinfo
>
> You'll want to find, e.g. 'vt' on Intel.

Not quite, that would actually be 'vmx' on Intel. For AMD, 'svm'.

Also, note that VMWare's trapping and emulating of certain system calls 
actually has a lower performance hit than doing it via full hardware, if 
you're talking 32-bit guests. This is supposed to change in future improved 
versions of vmx and svm, but at least for the time being, VMware actually 
doesn't use the hardware virt extensions for a lot of 32-bit guest 
operations. I can't recall off the top of my head exactly what it was that is 
missing in 64-bit land that exists on 32-bit land that makes that possible, 
but I've got the details with a cpu cycle-by-cycle breakdown of why that's 
the case around here somewhere...

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com