QEMU slowdown and portability

Posted Feb 7, 2007 0:19 UTC (Wed) by mikov (guest, #33179)
In reply to: QEMU slowdown and portability by jreiser
Parent article: KQEMU 1.3.0pre10 released - under the GPL

I am not closely familiar Win4Lin, but I am pretty sure that you cannot draw conclusions about QEMU from Win4Lin. They are completely different products, so I don't really see the relevance. AFAIK, Win4Lin does not use QEMU's user mode component, which is quite important.

I suggest you test with QEMU and install Win2K instead of WinXP before you form an opinion. I have never experienced such terrible performance as you are describing even without the accelerator. When running with full kernel virtualization (which was added recently,AFAIK), I found the performance comparable to VMWare. Plus, it certainly did not take me many hours to install Windows itself, and it is much larger than TurboTax.

I fail to see your point about GCC 4: this is not a fundamental technological limitation. Plus, there are no significant host architectures supported only by GCC4 and not by GCC3 (are there any at all?).

BTW, I am not affiliated with QEMU in any way, except by being a happy user. It has literally enabled me to do things that I didn't think possible, like running Windows-only applications as software appliances on a headless Linux box, which I find to be incredibly cool.

I will grant you that QEMU is not perfect though - for example saving and loading the virtual machine state doesn't work well yet, as of version 0.9.