Hi Grant,
On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Grant McWilliams grantmasterflash@gmail.com wrote:
Todd, I think there's more than one way to look at this as well. As Xen becomes more of a product and less of an installable package it will probably have to be profiled as a product.
The XCP devs hope that XCP will eventually be available via a package install (for example something similar to yum install xcp).
Say benchmark XCP on particular hardware and benchmark RHEL KVM on the same hardware and ESX as well. It makes sense to benchmark a XEN kernel and a KVM kernel if we have that flexibility but that's starting to shrink. Another test that I don't think is THAT important anymore is tesing Xen with and without pvops kernels. There were some rumors going around that the old 2.6.18 kernel was faster than the new pvops. I was going to put together tests and never got to it. Not that it makes any difference in the future because the old kernel is fast going away.
Yeah the old one is going away, comparing the forward port kernel (for example from OpenSUSE) to the new pv_ops one is what we will want to do. The pv_ops one may be better or worse under certain loads, but unless we test, how will we know? Once we can demonstrate it, the pv_ops kernel can be improved as needed too.
What I'd like to have is a standardized test with a way of multiple people uploading it and comparing results so we can run it on as many systems as possible. Data correlation could then be done on the data. Currently we have one test over here and another over there and the tests never seem to be updated or even run again to verify results. Maybe none of it matters as the hypervisor becomes inconsequential.
Great, yes that is what research at Clarkson University tried to do. As far as I know no one at Clarkson is actively working on it though. I will check with them when I get a chance though.
I'm going to look at the tests you've done as soon as time permits.
What we completed were some basic things. There is still more to test.
Thanks, Todd