Hardware Virtualization Slower Than Software?

Jim Buzbee writes "Those you keeping up with the latest virtualization techniques being offered by both Intel and AMD will be interested in a new white paper by VMWare that comes to the surprising conclusion that hardware-assisted x86 virtualization oftentimes fails to outperform software-assisted virtualization. My reading of the paper says that this counterintuitive result is often due to the fact that hardware-assisted virtualization relies on expensive traps to catch privileged instructions while software-assisted virtualization uses inexpensive software substitutions. One example given is compilation of a Linux kernel under a virtualized Linux OS. Native wall-clock time: 265 seconds. Software-assisted virtualization: 393 seconds. Hardware-assisted virtualization: 484 seconds. Ouch. It sounds to me like a hybrid approach may be the best answer to the virtualization problem. "

Comments

Re:The correct conclusion is more limited

[lukas84]

The IBM iSeries (identical to the pSeries hardware) also have a hardware HyperVisor.

Their entry models (10k US$) are slow as shit though. Can't say anything about the more expensive machine, but anything that requires around 12 hours to upgrade it's operating system can't be trusted.

Re:No not really

[chris_eineke]

However if I were to guess as to why this might be the case I'd say it's because they didn't do it right.

Holy crap, you just bloated "They're wrong." into 26 words. Do you work as a government advisor in your free time?