[vfio-users] Physical vs virtual machine gaming performance comparison benchmarks

[Jon Panozzo]

On Sep 6, 2015 5:54 AM, "Blank Field" <ihatethisfield at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Have you used cpu pinning?

Yes.  Our OS automatically pins CPUs for VMs.

> Do you attach a screen to your "NAS" box or you connect remotely? If
using remote connection, what is it, VNC, Spice or some other?

Yes, local graphics output.  No remote connection used, although I also
leverage Steam in home streaming from other devices for gaming as well.
Our primary use case is to allow folks to add NAS capability to a
performance gaming rig.  We also have Docker support.  This allows 3 tiers
of functionality: network attached storage, virtual applications, and
virtual machines.

> Did you enable HugePages?

No, we don't have hugepages enabled.  We tested hugepages before, but
honestly didn't see any gains.  We do have transparent pages enabled on the
host, but our guests do not make use of the <hugepages> XML tag (we use
libvirt).

> How much memory the VM had allocated?

The blog post covers this:

"...other thing worth noting here was that for our bare metal test, all
16GB of RAM was accessible to the OS, but with our VM tests, we only
allotted 8 of the 16GB of RAM."

>
> On Sep 6, 2015 12:50 PM, "Jon Panozzo" <jonp at lime-technology.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello vfio users!
>>
>> A common question folks seem to have is what sort of performance they
can expect out of a VM for gaming as compared to that of a physical
machine. My company makes a linux-based OS that features the capabilities
of a NAS and a virtualization host using KVM, which has been tuned for
maximum compatibility with vfio GPU assignment.
>>
>> In a recent blog post, I've shown benchmark testing results in comparing
a physical machine to a virtual one using the same hardware and with
varying VM configurations. I even put together a video clip showing a side
by side comparison of the benchmarks as they ran in real time, allowing you
to visually see the difference in each test. Thought this might be of
interest to some of you, do here's the link:
>>
>> http://lime-technology.com/gaming-on-a-nas-you-better-believe-it/
>>
>> Tl;Dr:  I achieved up to 98% of bare metal.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Jonathan Panozzo
>> Lime Technology, Inc.
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> vfio-users mailing list
>> vfio-users at redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/vfio-users/attachments/20150906/bc590ef6/attachment.htm>