Status of virtual SMP

[nvivo]

Hi,

Given some issues (usually slowness and stability) some of us have been reporting about the new virtual SMP feature, it would be good if developers or even people closer to the coding could give us some insight on the status of this feature. I couldn't find much info in the mailing lists or the forum, just some complaints and reports, so it would be cool if people that have this info could share here. Some questions I have:

1. What should we expect from this feature today? (is it highly experimental and intended only for testing, or should it be helping the performance in this release already?)

2. What should we expect in the near future? (Are these problems just small bugs that could be fixed in the next release or so, or is this feature something that will be in active development for a long time to get to an usable state, like the 3D support?)

3. Does it work better/worse with some hosts/guests? Is there any proper VM setup to avoid speed issues?

4. Does it work better with processor A or B, or with more or less cores?

5. How does it compare to this same feature in VMWare? Did VB

Thanks.

[TerryE]

]1. What should we expect from this feature today? Read the release notes. it is experimental and not intended for production use.

2. What should we expect in the near future? IMHO, it will take 3.0.2, 3.0.4, 3.2.0 ,3.2.2 -- say 9 months before its stability matches testing, or exceeds VMware Server. It is complex functionality to shake down.

3. Does it work better/worse with some hosts/guests? Is there any proper VM setup to avoid speed issues? Too soon to judge.

4. Does it work better with processor A or B, or with more or less cores? Too soon to judge.

5. How does it compare to this same feature in VMWare? It is already functionally richer than VMware Server. I suspect in that 6-9 month period it will really give this free VMware product strong competition in the SMP niche. ESX is a different issue.

[nvivo]

Hi TerryE,

1. What should we expect from this feature today? Read the release notes. it is experimental and not intended for production use.

I'm not sure where this is written. Are the release notes in a separated file somewhere? The changelog and the the announcement here in the forum are the same, and they say: "The following major new features were added: * Guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs (VT-x and AMD-V only; see chapter 3.7.2.2 of the user manual) ...", and the manual tells how to set it up, but I can't see where it states its experimental. I thought it was, just couldn't find this written down. Maybe I'm just tired... =)

Anyway, I think 9 months is a good estimate! Lets see how it goes. From some posts I read here, I really thought it would take years to have this feature in VirtualBox. Not that I need it today, working in my VMs is usually faster working in my host... but still will be great to improve even more the performance of the guests.

Thanks for the explanation!

[TerryE]

... it is experimental ...

I'm not sure where this is written. Are the release notes in a separated file somewhere? ... I thought it was, just couldn't find this written down.

You are correct, and my apologies. Maybe I am mis-remembering the beta release notes. Nonetheless, I still treat it as experimental. I do too much prod work on my AMD-V box to upgrade to 3.0.0 yet.