Intel Haswell Linux Virtualization: KVM vs. Xen vs. VirtualBox

DcData AdminPublic

The latest chapter to our lengthy Intel Haswell on Linux saga is virtualization benchmarks. From Fedora 19 with the very latest software components for Linux virtualization, the performance of KVM, Xen, and VirtualBox were benchmarked from the Intel Core i7 4770K “Haswell” CPU.

Since last month’s Haswell launch we have published many benchmarks of the new Intel CPUs but not being covered at Phoronix until today is the Linux virtualization performance for Haswell. With Intel hardware virtualization enabled, KVM, Xen, and VirtualBox were compared from a clean Fedora 19 64-bit installation.

Fedora 19 presently has the Linux 3.9.8 kernel with GCC 4.8.1, Mesa 9.2.0-devel, and an EXT4 file-system. All of the virtualization components were obtained from the Fedora 19 repository, including QEMU 1.4.2, Xen 4.2.2, and the libvirt / virt-manager components. Xen and KVM virtualization were setup through virt-manager. VirtualBox 4.2.16 was obtained from VirtualBox.org and installed on Fedora 19.

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