Xen PVHVM with FreeBSD10 Guest

Sydney Meyer meyer.sydney at googlemail.com
Sun Jan 19 01:10:18 UTC 2014


Hello Roger,

here are the results. I’ve tested FreeBSD 9.2, 10.0-RC5 in conjunction with XEN PVHVM,XEN-QEMU-DM, KVM-VirtIO and the bare metal performance of the hosts, every run respectively with file IO via raw images and block IO via LVM volumes. Each VM ran with 1GB of memory and 1 VCPU. The results are the average of 3 consecutive runs with bonnie, writing each time the double size of the hosts memory. Xen 4.1 with Linux 3.2 Dom0 and QEMU 0.10.2 on Intel i3 4310T / 8 GB, KVM with Linux 3.11 on Intel i7 860 / 12 GB.

Please keep in mind that these results are more of an “subjective” impression rather a scientific comparison held under the exact same conditions, etc.

http://pastebin.com/pUZfXda7

+----------+-----+-------+--------+------------+-----------+
|    OS    | HV  | Disk  |   IO   | Write MB/s | Read MB/s |
+----------+-----+-------+--------+------------+-----------+
| 9.2      | Xen | File  | QEMU   | 60,5       | 111,2     |
| 9.2      | Xen | File  | PV     | 43,2       | 106,5     |
| 9.2      | Xen | Block | QEMU   | 49,4       | 91,0      |
| 9.2      | Xen | Block | PV     | 72,9       | 100,4     |
| 10.0     | Xen | File  | PV     | 38,6       | 107,2     |
| 10.0     | Xen | Block | PV     | 72,6       | 99,8      |
| 9.2      | KVM | File  | VirtIO | 40,6       | 138,1     |
| 9.2      | KVM | Block | VirtIO | 44,5       | 131,6     |
| 10.0     | KVM | File  | VirtIO | 38,1       | 131,4     |
| 10.0     | KVM | Block | VirtIO | 43,2       | 134,7     |
| Xen Host |     |       |        | 90,1       | 109,0     |
| KVM Host |     |       |        | 93,4       | 126,1     |
+----------+-----+-------+--------+------------+-----------+

As you can see, there are no leads to my inital observation (Emulated Block IO “faster” than PVHVM Block IO). I will take a closer look what went wrong first time, probably some sort of caching issue. 

Anyhow, i’ve read that you have been working together with others to bring PVHVM support into GENERIC, so i wanted to thank you and all the other developers for making FreeBSD 10.0 another great release of this rock solid, awesome Operating System.

Native Xen PV- and therefore freebsd-update support are a very big plus in our evergoing fight against management over the choice of weapons.

Cheers,
S.

On 17.01.2014, at 16:38, Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau at citrix.com> wrote:

> On 17/01/14 10:17, Sydney Meyer wrote:
>> I’m doing some benchmarks with bonnie and dd on the Variations 9.2/10.0;PVHVM/VirtIO;fileio/blockio. I will post the results here to this thread.
> 
> By VirtIO I guess you mean emulated IO? That sounds great, I'm eager to
> see the results :)
> 
> Roger.



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