Re: Re: [Xen-users] pfSense HVM

[Matej Zary <zary@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2010-06-06 at 01:29 +0100, Jonathan Tripathy wrote:
> On 06/06/10 01:23, Matej Zary wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > looks like you have much better HW than I used - when I benched Linux HVM 
> > guest on Athlon X2 1,9 GHz I got scary results (in a bad way of course) :D. 
> > 90 mbit/s is not bad at all for emulated hvm guest - the questions is, how 
> > much CPU power it consumes in the dom0 (qemu-dm process) and how many 
> > availabe cores do you have. PV driver should solve this issue (or pci 
> > passthru for the WAN NIC and PV driver for the LAN NIC). I got better 
> > results is some cases with the default emulated NIC (realtek?),  but in 
> > majority, the emulated e1000 was better.
> >
> >
> > Regards
> >
> >
> > Matej
> >
> > ________________________________________
> > From: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> > [xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jonathan Tripathy 
> > [jonnyt@xxxxxxxxxxx]
> > Sent: 06 June 2010 00:35
> > To: Nicolas Vilz; Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Subject: Re: [Xen-users] pfSense HVM
> >
> >    
> 
> Hi Matej,
> 
> Well it's a quad core Xeon X3430 with 8GB of RAM. I'm using 
> PCI-Passthrough for the WAN NIC, and e1000 for the LAN NIC. Since it's 
> pfsense, it isn't easy (if at all possible) to get this going with PV.
> 
> So even though e1000 is a "gigabit" driver, 90Mb/s is ok for HVM you think?
> 
> Thanks

You can try bench the throughput between wan and the pfsense (how fast
ist the pci-passthru) and the between the pfsense and another domu or
Dom0(how slow is the emulation). Iperf is neat CLI utility for this. :)

Also when benching the pfsense-domx, watch the CPU utilization in the
Dom0 (top, or better with dstat). The emulation tends to induce quite a
cpu load in the dom0 via the qemu-dm process (at least on my shoddy old
hw :) ). Emulation is really ineffective and I think that the various
emulation NIC models don't have that significant impact on the overall
speed - the "slowness" of this method lies in the nature of
emulation. :)

I attached one graph from my benchmarks - all results are in Mbit/s,
iperf TCP bench with 3 different overall frame lengths. PC was another
physical computer (same HW config) - so this is physical to virtual
bench. Just for illustration of the PV drivers impact. :)

Regards

Matej

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