LinuxVirt:

While benchmarks are a very difficult exercixe and as such the results must be considered carefully, they are still interesting to compare the respective performance between the solutions for different workloads.

This page will try to keep an eye on the relative performances of Xen and KVM. Until virtio is not part of the mainstream linux kernel, the tests will concentrate on performance on HVM systems, so the guest system will be an "unmodified OS".

13 Feb 2008

Intel system

Tests on an Intel based system with an Intel Core2 2Ghz and 2GB RAM. The test VM for both Xen and KVM is the same image: an unmodified Debian Lenny kernel 2.6.22 amd64 w/512 MB RAM

The test is still the "make clean && make allnoconfig && time make" of a 2.6.24 kernel

run

1

2

3

real

2m34

2m24

2m25

user

1m23

1m22

1m22

sys

1m0

1m0

1m1

dbench 10: 243 MB/s

run

1

2

3

real

2m12

2m13

2m12

user

1m27

1m28

1m27

sys

0m43

0m43

0m43

dbench 10: 255 MB/s

real

1m31

user

1m11

sys

0m10

dbench 10: 505 MB/s

AMD system

Tests on an AMD based system with an AMD X2 4400+ and 4GB RAM. The test VM for both Xen and KVM is the same image: an unmodified Debian Lenny kernel 2.6.22 amd64 w/512 MB RAM

The test is still the "make clean && make allnoconfig && time make" of a 2.6.24 kernel

run

1

2

3

real

2m28

2m17

2m16

user

1m27

1m27

1m27

sys

0m51

0m49

0m49

run

1

2

3

real

2m31

2m29

2m29

user

1m36

1m36

1m36

sys

0m52

0m53

0m52

12 Feb 2008

Thanks for Dan Berrange who pointed me on xen.org instead of xensource.com as a source of download for the latest Xen.

The tests consists of the compilation of a linux kernel 2.6.24 with allnoconfig (make allnoconfig && time make). The host hardware is a 1.86Ghz Intel Core2duo.

unmodified VM: 64bits Debian Etch

The first two tests run the same Virtual Machine with an unmodified 64bits Debian Etch.

run

1

2

3

real

2m26

2m19

2m20

user

1m21

1m22

1m21

sys

1m02

0m58

1m00

run

1

2

3

real

2m11

2m07

2m07

user

1m26

1m26

1m26

sys

0m45

0m40

0m40

paravirtualised VM: 64bits Debian Etch with xenified kernel

The following test runs on the same hardware than the previous one. The kernel used in the DomU is the same as in Dom0:

run

1

2

3

real

1m34

1m33

1m33

user

1m17

1m18

1m18

sys

0m15

0m15

0m15

11 Feb 2008

For the following 2 tests, the system is an Intel core 2 duo 2.4Ghz w/ 2GB RAM running the latest available versions:

The guest used in both case is the exact same VM (non-paravirtualised 64 bit Debian etch with 256 MB RAM).

Guest system boot-up time

plateform

time in seconds

Xen

23

KVM

20

Kernel compilation benchmark

Time to compile a 2.6.24 allnoconfig

plateform

real time

user time

sys time

Xen

1m53

1m06

0m43

KVM

1m03

1m06

0m33

plateform

real time

user time

sys time

Xen

1m52

1m07

0m43

KVM

0m56

1m07

0m31

LinuxVirt: XenVsKVM (last edited 2008-02-13 16:32:09 by GildasLeNadan)