About the performance of VirtualBox under FreeBSD versus Linux

H

HX Wang

Hi,

I want FreeBSD as my workstation, just as a host system for VirtualBox. But I don't know if the performance of VirtualBox will be too low to run?

I want to use a Linux platform, but I hate the complex configuration between many many Linux distros, and I hate the ceaseless updating; because I like FreeBSD, strong, solid as a rock, and the concise configuration. So, I want it as my VirtualBox workstation to run Windows and Linux.

The only thing I am worried about is the performance. So, who can give me some advice or some testing resources about VirtualBox under FreeBSD versus Linux?

Thankful for any ideas.

Thanks a lot!
 
What makes you think it will be slow? I can't compare performance, as I have not used Linux as a VirtualBox host. On the same hardware, I would expect it to be about the same. I run FreeBSD, Windows, and sometimes Linux VM clients. They run fine.
 
I have found their performance to be about the same. I haven't done anything really intensive on either one, but running Windows. Linux, and FreeBSD guests on both CentOS 6.x and FreeBSD 10.x hosts -- the CentOS one probably having better hardware -- performance has been about the same. I have no benchmarks and haven't done much with the guests on either one, but I haven't noticed a difference.
 
I had trouble with the stability of VirtualBox on FreeBSD. That was almost a year ago. So we stuck with a Springdale Linux host (Red Hat clone). In the mean time I migrated everything to KVM and the performance is better but it has not been without a pain. I really, really needed the 9P file system to work (passthrough distributed file system from Plan 9) for a common storage data pool. It turns out that the Linux port is vaporware like many things. I had to use vulnerable NFS instead. If we had more time for planning it might have been possible to use FreeBSD jails instead but you never know when you need to run something else on top of your FreeBSD. I am really curious about the current state of BHyVe because that would be an alternative.
 
On my workstation, which I put together last March I think, I have FreeBSD 9.3 as the host with VirtualBox and Windows7, CentOS6, PC-BSD and Linux Mint. I often run Windows7 and CentOS at the same time while testing web sites but sometimes include Linux Mint. I have never noticed any issues I recall but I also have 32GB of RAM, SSD and Sandy processor.
 
I use a FreeBSD 9.1 system as host for 5 WinXP guests. All of them running the whole time, used as headless RDP-server. It has worked for about two years without trouble. I have not noticed any performance issues, but the guests are not under heavy load.
 
HX Wang

I want FreeBSD as my workstation, just as a host system for VirtualBox. But I don't know if the performance of VirtualBox will be too low to run?
Click to expand...

It's just as fast (if not faster) but the USB pass-throughput does not work anymore.
 
HX Wang said:
I want FreeBSD as my workstation, just as a host system for VirtualBox. But I don't know if the performance of VirtualBox will be too low to run?
Click to expand...
It's virtualization, not emulation. Performance should be the same regardless of the host OS. However, certain additional features, like the aforementioned USB pass-through, may or may not work.
 
The main difference where performance is concerned which I can think of is that FreeBSD could be more easily tweaked to gain some more performance out of it. I'm now of course referring to the option of building the whole base OS yourself.

But the thing is that in general the performance gain is most likely not extremely spectacular.

One thing though: you say that you dislike the ceaseless updates on the Linux platform. That would be a poor argument to use FreeBSD in my opinion because FreeBSD is pretty much the same in that respect as well. Every major operating system "suffers" from continuous updates.
 
Oko said:
I am really curious about the current state of BHyVe because that would be an alternative.
Click to expand...
I am playing with bhyve lately. The machine I am using is an "old" i7 920 Nehalem with 6 GB of memor, so the VM are limited to just one processor. Installation of FreBSD VMs is easy, but I have not tried yet neither Linux nor other BSD.

Two things I would like to be enhanced are tapn interface automation and the ability to use a base disk image a la jails. Not a big hassle, but to add a new VM I need to create a new tapn interface and to add it to a bridge, however as I said not a big hassle for I can create those beforehand and bridge them, as I did, but it is not dynamic.

As for base disk image, I guess it is enough to have a base image created and then copy it, but copying a image created with truncate allocates all the data, and it is not very fast.

A thing I like is memory management. It is possible to create VM with much more memory than the host (I tried 50 GB per VM and OK, but 100 GB did not work), and as long as the host has free swap space, those VM get their assigned memory seamlessly.
 
In short I would say, "Just try it", if you have the time.

As VirtualBox is available for a multitude of platforms it is almost a way of providing hardware and software abstraction (granted that term is loosely used here). Try the FreeBSD set-up and if it is the same or better then you can stick with it. If it does not you can re-install Linux. This is, of course, provided you are able to move your hard disk files easily.
 
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