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

seems like such a waste

[FudRucker]

seems like such as waste of resources, why not just port the software over to the other OS/platform so it can run natively...

Bullshit

[nacs]

Just because VMware is incompetent and can't implement hardware VT correctly, doesn't mean VT is slower. Try Parallels or Xen to see VT implmented correctly. Vmware has broken VT.