On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen(a)tmr.com> wrote:
I installed FC14 in a VM, on a 7.7GB disk image. After that was
installed and
tested to some extent, I copied the image to an 8GB SD memory and booted off it.
Worked with the micro-SD in an adaptor to full size SD, and in a micro-SD to USB
nubbin. When I installed I made the filesystems ext2 to avoid beating the
storage, other than that stock install.
Now I can select enhanced effects for video, and they work fine (for values of
fine considering I wanted to see if they work, not that I want them on).
However, the display is still dog slow, glxgears runs at 60fps, video is jerky,
etc. So the "better" video now doesn't crash, does provide effects I
don't need,
and is still too slow to be useful, even on a non-game machine. So much for not
using vendor drivers.
System is i7-950, 12GB RAM, Radeon HD 4350 video, used as a VM host most of the
time. Not a killer machine, not a dog.
I will be doing some testing to see if the newer KVM is any better in a
measurable way, but when VNC to a machine with fast video is better than
console, there is room for improvement.
Sorry that I've just noticed your original post.
You may remember that I've posted elsewhere that I've talked about
being very pleased with core i7-920 supporting a mixture of guests,
with a Radeon video card. All of that reported experience uses
Windows Vista as the host and VMWare software to run the guest
operating systems.
I had previously tried using Fedora as the host OS, and I am now
determined to wait for a viable bare metal hypervisor before trying
any further experiments.
The Windows Vista/VMWare guest setup appears to involve a fair bit of
baling wire and chewing gum, with the need to install VMWare "tools"
that are *very* specific to the guest OS. Windows XP runs noticeably
better as a guest than does Fedora (surprise, surprise). Windows XP
integrates seamlessly with the sound card. For Fedora, the fact that
I don't really need a sound card is a big plus (it works, but it's
clunky).
For everyday operations, though, it's hard to tell that I'm using a
virtual machine, even when the virtual machine is acting as an
x-server for a remote box. If I were to continue trying to use Fedora
as a virtual host at this point, I'd see it as my contribution to what
is obviously a very immature software technology. The hardware
appears to be more than up to the task.
Robert.