Re:VirtualBox KVM Public Release
by peterhull90 on Thursday February 08, 2024 @08:17AM
(#39301587)
And could one swap between the two backends with the same VM image (.vbox +.vdi) to see which one gave the better performance?
Re:VirtualBox KVM Public Release
by blitzclone on Thursday February 08, 2024 @08:32AM
(#39301690)
Yes!
Re:VirtualBox KVM Public Release
by garaetjjte on Thursday February 08, 2024 @09:54AM
(#39302592)
eBPF for in-kernel device emulation, then?
EDIT: That was a joke, but actually it is a thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTMls33dG8Q
From a performance perspective, it's a bit more complicated. KVM has support for modern virtualization features (Intel APICv, AMD AVIC, etc) that vanilla VBox lacks. You get these in the VirtualBox/KVM version. On the other hand, vanilla VBox emulates most devices in the kernel (see above). So SATA emulation in vanilla VBox is very fast compared to KVM/Qemu or KVM/VirtualBox for a bit unfair reasons. Modern devices, such as virtio or NVMe, are not as impacted by that.
tl;dr So the performance you get depends on your workload. If it's very interrupt heavy, VirtualBox/KVM will win. If it uses antiquated virtual devices (SATA), vanilla VirtualBox (with vboxdrv) will have an edge.