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".

12/02/2008

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 Lenny

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

• Host is an opensource Xen-3.2 (from xen.org) with a Dom0 running a kernel-2.6.18-xen, Dom0 userspace is a 64bits Debian Lenny

• Host is a 64bits Debian Lenny with a 2.6.24 kernel and KVM-60

paravirtualised VM: 64bits Debian Lenny with xenified kernel

The following test runs on the same hardware than the previous one.

• Host is an opensource Xen 3.2 (from xen.org) with a Dom0 running a kernel-2.6.18-xen, Dom0 userspace is a 64bits Debian Lenny

11/02/2008

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: opensource Xen 3.1.0 (from xen.xensource.com) + 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 (non-paravirtualised 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