These are old tests now and not necessarily perfect, but they were Xen
and KVM on the same kernel. KVM very early on and not necessarily in its best light. The Xen dom0/domU kernel was also not the best light for Xen. The point was to try to compare them on the same kernel. Xen and KVM on the same kernel has happened in the form of OpenSUSE's forward port of the Xen dom0 kernel with KVM that is already in mainline. The pv_ops kernel is not fully mainline, but is getting close. Some distros now have Xen dom0 kernels based on the pv_ops kernel, which could also run KVM.
I wonder if using things like puppet, the phoronix test suite, etc. are a simpler way to go? I guess it all depends on how general a benchmarking tool is needed.
Thanks, Todd
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. 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.
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.
I'm going to look at the tests you've done as soon as time permits.
Grant McWilliams
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use Windows." Now they have two problems.