On 07/06/2012 01:40 PM, Phong X Nguyen wrote:
>> Speaking of fake, it took me years to bend my mind around the fact
>> >that the VM CPUs are fake too.  They are not actually using
>> >a particular CPU.  It was a light bulb moment.
>> >

> Well, most operating systems don't have affinity for any particular CPU
 > either, so that's not particularly new? So long as the
 > instructions are properly being dispatched ...

You can have 100 VCPUs if you desire.  They are all fake (virtual).
Before I understood this, I thought that a core was specifically
assigned to each VCPU.

>> >
>> >On my VM, W7 is still half as fast as XP and ten times less
>> >stable -- pretty much matches what I see in the field.
>> >And Lotus Approach, which I use for my business accounting,
>> >runs worse on W7 than it runs on Wine.
>> >
> Can I get more details about your issues? I routinely run Windows
 > 7 in VMs (generally VMWare) and get near-native speed for anything
 > except GPU-bound tasks. It's also rock-solid stable. So I'm curious
 > about your problems you mention you keep having.

I am running KVM under SL 6.2 64 bit:

$ rpm -qa \*dump\*
dump-0.4-0.6.b42.el6.x86_64

$ rpm -qa \*kvm\*
qemu-kvm-0.12.1.2-2.209.el6_2.4.x86_64

$ uname -r
2.6.32-220.23.1.el6.x86_64

$ rpm -qa \*spice\*
spice-protocol-0.8.1-2.el6.noarch
spice-gtk-python-0.6-2.el6.x86_64
spice-server-0.8.2-5.el6.x86_64
spice-client-0.8.2-7.el6.x86_64
spice-glib-0.6-2.el6.x86_64
spice-gtk-0.6-2.el6.x86_64
spice-vdagent-0.8.1-3.el6.x86_64


This only happens when I run or have run my XP VM.  Does
not matter if the XP VM is running or not, just that it
has run.  My "dump" backup go from 1 hr, 12 min to 5 hr,
30 min.   Five times slower.  Reboot fixes the problem.

My main issue with this is:

1)  that is it a pain in the butt

2)  I am concerned that this will also happen with
     Windows server 2003, which is based on the XP kernel.

As I have stated before, only running the XP VM does this.
None of the rest of them do.

>
> My general experience (for a fairly broad spectrum of users) is for
 > most relatively-recent hardware (e.g. >2GB RAM, half-decent IGP, etc.)
 > Windows 7 is as-fast, faster and a lot more productive than XP (the
 >  last due to general UI improvements).

Are you comparing 32 bit XP to 64 bit W7?  I also turn off that
stupid "Aero" interface, which gives a bump.  (Linux 64 bit
is the eight wonder of the world!)

Had one lady that wanted a custom computer with W7 Pro on it.
She mainly does accounting stuff.  She ran it for a year.  After
W7 corrupted her hard drive, she had finally had it with
all the crashing, bugs, etc.., So, I upgraded her to XP,
she is twice as fast and hardly ever crashes anymore.
No more corrupted hard drive either.  (It was corrupted
so bad that the Windows installer could not read it.  Good
thing I am handy with linux, or she would have lost everything.
Got to love Xfce Live CD.)  She really wanted to like W7 too.
This is my experience.

By the way, I really love (gag) the crash and roll back feature in W7.
Especially when it removes all the customization I have added
to the customer's machine at their request.  (Workaround: make
six restore points when you are finished customizing.)  I have
another customer that can't keep his network shares installed
for his life.  Crash and roll back.
[editorial comment] AAAAAHHHHHH!!!  What a piece of Junk! [/editorial 
comment]

-T