12 Jun
2009
12 Jun
'09
1:38 p.m.
Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
Someone told me that VMware still emulates some of the
instructions that
could be virtualized either because they are buggy or slow. Don't take
my word for it though.
At one point, VMware added support for the hardware virtualization
features from AMD and Intel, but by default it was disabled, because it
was often slower than their existing software approach. In AMD's recent
processors (Barcelona and newer), they've added enhancements to AMD-V
such as nested page tables and the IOMMU, which are supposed to improve
the performance of hypervisors, but I don't know whether VMware
currently takes advantage of them.