bhyve issues on Dell C6220 node

[Matt Churchyard]

> On 9 Jan 2020, at 18:58, Yamagi Burmeister <lists at yamagi.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
>>> 2016 is slow (even slower doing windows updates).  2019 is much better.  A tip I have found is a minimum of 1 cpu, 2 cores and 4 threads to get decent speed from that OS (more CPUs in bhyve >tends to make performance worse - in my observations - in 2016).  Also, use the Virtio collection from RedHat for vionet and viostor.  We are currently using 0.1.171 without issue.  The ahci >emulation in itself is extremely slow.  NVMe and virtio is really the only way to go.
>> Is there anything else I can check here? I haven’t got round to testing networking yet but I’m using nvme for the disk.
>> It’s basically unusable and there is no way I could put anything production on it. Just highlighting an icon on the desktop takes several seconds.
> 
> Windows is slow when running on Intel CPUs that don't support APICv.
> That are (nearly?) all desktop CPUs, all Xeons before Sandy Bridge
> and some Xeons after it. The problem is that Bhyve doesn't implement
> TPR shadowing. I'm currently working on it. The review can be found
> here: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D22942 The speedup is about factor
> 6!
> 
> I've received some feedback in a private mail, a second version that
> adds TPR thresholds can be found in my Github branch here:
> https://github.com/Yamagi/freebsd/commits/wip/tpr_shadowing 
> 
> A backport to 12.1 (the branch also includes the Intel SpeedShift
> patches from https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18028) is here:
> https://github.com/Yamagi/freebsd/commits/production/12.1
> 
> I've applied it to 2 of my production servers about 4 hours ago. Looks
> good so far. I'll update the review when I'm sure that it doesn't break
> anything, maybe early next week.

I’ve had a system with the TPR changes applied for a few hours now and it seems to be ok. The install took less than 10 minutes compared to 40+ minutes before and is much more useable.

I’ll leave it running over the weekend and see how it goes.

Regards
Matt


> 
> Regards,
> Yamagi
> 
> -- 
> Homepage: https://www.yamagi.org
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