Eben King wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Jul 2006, Jason Boxman wrote:
>
<snip>
>>
>> I thought about it, but my laptop is a P4-based Celeron and doesn't
>> support
>> any MHz throttling.
>
> All the more reason to disable it in the guest OS -- if it tries to lower
> the CPU speed, VMware may try and wait, hang, or crash trying.
I'd be impressed if the virtual CPU advertised support for SpeedStepping or
whatever the power stepping stuff is called these days.
<snip>
>>
>> That was my first thought, but my favorite part is that wasn't happening
>> at
>> all. I was at most 12M in swap.
>
> Out of 13M, that's probably bad; but out of 500M, I wouldn't worry. FWIW, I
> did run my laptop for a time netbooted, with no swap, and with the drive
> spun down. So no swap is possible, although there are analyses indicating
> it's suboptimal. I don't know how that applies to OSes on emulated hardware
> though.
It was out of 600M or somewhere thereabouts. I had tons of free RAM in
additional to a healthy amount of cached memory allocated.
>> Generally my CPU was always pegged in the host at 100%.
>
> CPU time accounting inside VMware is wonky.
It seems to be -- however the host Windows 2000 SP4 system was generally
pegged at 100% CPU by VMWare when the VM was attempting to do anything, even
tasks that involved a minimum of disk I/O.
>> `vmstat` reported nearly no disk access and never any I/O
>> wait at all, just sys pegging the guest. I never could pin it on anything
>> specifically as the host was idle. Ordinarily I'd suspect DMA was off in
>> either the host or the guest, except it wasn't.
>
> I get small writes, every second or two, with Linux 2.6.15.1 on ext3 * 5.
> I think it's somebody updating the journal on mounted partitions with
> something like "2006-07-31 13:23:50 no transactions".
I had rare writes in the two digit size from `vmstat`.
I wasn't able to track down any obvious evidence of being I/O bound. The
CPU bound issue was puzzling and there's probably a key somewhere that
unlocks that, but I couldn't find it.
I'll just end up dual booting, it seems.
Of course Windows always sees my extended logical partition as a drive,
which makes it sad. After fumbling I can usually unassign that drive
letter. Further, /fixboot and /fixmbr fail to recover my GRUB owned MBR
whenever I wipe the dual boot. Dual booting always causes me such pain on
the Windows side -- hence my desire to cheat with VMWare. Oh well.
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