While benchmarks are a very difficult exercice 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 (OpenSource version) and KVM for a non paravirtualized CPU (i-e with HVM).

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

• for xen: Xen 3.1.0 + Dom0 kernel based on kernel.org 2.6.18
• for KVM: kvm-60 on a 2.6.23

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

Guest system boot-up time

Kernel compilation benchmark

Time to compile a 2.6.24 allnoconfig

• first try - cold cache

• second try - w/ cache