KVM Goodness

KVM seems to be holding up well, and thanks to the generosity of my employer in getting me a dual-CPU laptop I can run one guest and barely notice any slowdown in my normal activities. Having two guests running seems to slow things down a touch, but it's something that I could live with if I had to. Normally I won't be running guests at all but it's nice to have the capability when I need it.

I went all out today and installed Windows 7 64bit Enterprise in a virtual host. Surprisingly it works well although I think I may be missing out on some of the bling due to 3D driver issues - I'm not sure as I've never run Windows 7 on "real" hardware, and I have only minimal experience with Vista. I'm having better luck than a co-worker that tried Windows 7 on a spare PC but gave up on it because the video card appeared to be unsupported.

KSM (Kernel SamePage Merging) seems to be working, this is from when I had two guests running - one running Windows XP (32bit) and one running Windows 7 (64bit).

[root@lt26923 ~]# cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_shared
1
[root@lt26923 ~]# cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_sharing 
38430
[root@lt26923 ~]# cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_unshared 
378

At least I think that's what these numbers mean... I haven't dug too deeply to understand what they really mean.

The one thing that doesn't appear to be working is sound. Windows 7 doesn't appear to have the correct driver for the virtual sound card and in Windows XP the virtual sound card gets matched up with a driver but I don't get any sound out of my speakers. I'm not super concerned as I don't plan on using the guests for anything that would make sound necessary.