Michael Eager wrote:
Actually, it turns out that the software virtualization is just as fast as the hardware virtualization, perhaps even faster. Lots of reasons, but one is that once the VM software rewrites a section of priviledged code, it never touches it again. With the hardware virtualization support, the VM interprets it every time it is executed.
For VMware that may be true, but kqemu's (the QEMU software virtualization accelerator) performance is less than stellar, KVM (hardware virtualization) is probably a lot faster (though I haven't done any direct comparison myself yet).
Kevin Kofler