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".

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.

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 Lenny with xenified kernel

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

run

1

2

3

real

1m34

1m33

1m33

user

1m17

1m18

1m18

sys

0m15

0m15

0m15

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:

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 2008-02-12 19:03:05 by GildasLeNadan)