KVM & Virtio (disk/nic) on Scientific Linux 6 (alpha 3)

Posted by dba477 on Dec 29, 2010 5:01 PM EDT
Xen Virtualization on Linux and Solaris; By Boris Derzhavets 		Mail this story
Print this story

KVM as a “full virtualization” is a nice feature because it allows you to run any operating system virtualized. However, it’s relatively slow because the hypervisor has to emulate actual physical devices such as RTL8139 network cards and the most recent SeaBios emulates IDE interface.This fragment from KVM guest dmesg log is fair enough 

[ 0.129740] ata_piix 0000:00:01.1: version 2.13
[ 0.129802] ata_piix 0000:00:01.1: setting latency timer to 64
[ 0.129954] scsi0 : ata_piix
[ 0.130522] scsi1 : ata_piix
[ 0.130552] ata1: PATA max MWDMA2 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0xc000 irq 14
[ 0.130554] ata2: PATA max MWDMA2 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0xc008 irq 15
Virtio is a Linux standard for network and disk device drivers where just the guest's device driver "knows" it is running in a virtual environment, and cooperates with the hypervisor. This enables guests to get high performance network and disk operations, and gives most of the performance benefits of paravirtualization.

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Tutorial; Groups: Red Hat

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.