installing f11 x86_64 inside f11 x86_64 is *cripplingly* slow

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm sure it's something i'm doing wrong, but it's taking *forever*
to install an f11 x86_64 guest on f11 x86_64.  i gave this VM 1 CPU,
1G of RAM and 10G of hard disk.  i seem to have VM extensions enabled
on this AMD 64-bit system (kvm_amd loaded, /dev/kvm exists).  but this
is going astonishingly slowly.

  it took, literally, *minutes* just to format the two filesystems.
right now, it's sitting at the first SW install screen, where it's
been for the last 10 minutes, even though the VMM reports that that VM
is using 49% CPU.

  should i expect this kind of performance?  because, as it stands,
this is completely unusable.  so i'm assuming i'm doing something
wrong, and i'm open to suggestions.

rday
--

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Linked In:                             http://www.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
========================================================================

[Bill Davidsen]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>    i'm sure it's something i'm doing wrong, but it's
> taking *forever*
>  to install an f11 x86_64 guest on f11 x86_64.  i gave this VM 1 CPU,
>  1G of RAM and 10G of hard disk.  i seem to have VM extensions enabled
>  on this AMD 64-bit system (kvm_amd loaded, /dev/kvm exists).  but this
>  is going astonishingly slowly.
>
>    it took, literally, *minutes* just to format the two filesystems.
>  right now, it's sitting at the first SW install screen, where it's
>  been for the last 10 minutes, even though the VMM reports that that VM
>  is using 49% CPU.
>
>    should i expect this kind of performance?  because, as it stands,
>  this is completely unusable.  so i'm assuming i'm doing something
>  wrong, and i'm open to suggestions.
>     
Since I usually run qemu-kvm from command line instead of using VMM, 
might I suggest you try that and see if you are using the virtualization 
hardware rather than emulation? Because it sounds a lot like my install 
of x86_64 on an i686 host, totally emulated. And it wasn't hung, just 
dog slow.

I'm not suggesting that you drop VMM for normal operations, just that 
you try without it to be sure you are getting what you need.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen(a)tmr.com&gt;
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc

"You are disgraced professional losers. And by the way, give us our money
back."
    - Representative Earl Pomeroy,  Democrat of North Dakota
on the A.I.G. executives who were paid bonuses  after a federal bailout.

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 09:09:06PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>  
>    i'm sure it's something i'm doing wrong, but it's taking *forever*
>  to install an f11 x86_64 guest on f11 x86_64.  i gave this VM 1 CPU,
>  1G of RAM and 10G of hard disk.  i seem to have VM extensions enabled
>  on this AMD 64-bit system (kvm_amd loaded, /dev/kvm exists).  but this
>  is going astonishingly slowly.
>  
>    it took, literally, *minutes* just to format the two filesystems.
>  right now, it's sitting at the first SW install screen, where it's
>  been for the last 10 minutes, even though the VMM reports that that VM
>  is using 49% CPU.
>  
>    should i expect this kind of performance?  because, as it stands,
>  this is completely unusable.  so i'm assuming i'm doing something
>  wrong, and i'm open to suggestions. 
Sounds like you are not using KVM even though its loaded....

Can you provide the output of 'virsh capabilities' and  for the guest
in question 'virsh dumpxml GUESTNAME'

Daniel
-- 
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London   -o-   http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
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All, see my other post on this topic.  I've had exactly the issue that
Robert describes below and I'm pretty sure my config is correct.  What I
just determined is that the problem seems to only occur with Fedora 11 beta
guests.  I've just installed a Fedora 10 -x64 guest and it installed
seemingly just as fast as on physical hardware.

I hope this clue helps.  If needed I can generate whatever config
information is needed for further diagnosis.

FYI.  

Regards,
 
 
Mike Hinz
President
YR20
1718 Fry Road, Suite 440
Houston, TX  77084
mike.hinz(a)yr20.com
832-225-1293 (o)
713-594-3095 (m)
832-550-2657 (f)

-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-virt-bounces(a)redhat.com [mailto:[e-mail]]
On Behalf Of Daniel P. Berrange
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 8:43 AM
To: Robert P. J. Day
Cc: Fedora Virtualization Mailing List
Subject: Re: [fedora-virt] installing f11 x86_64 inside f11 x86_64
is*cripplingly* slow

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 09:09:06PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>  
>    i'm sure it's something i'm doing wrong, but it's taking *forever*
>  to install an f11 x86_64 guest on f11 x86_64.  i gave this VM 1 CPU,
>  1G of RAM and 10G of hard disk.  i seem to have VM extensions enabled
>  on this AMD 64-bit system (kvm_amd loaded, /dev/kvm exists).  but this
>  is going astonishingly slowly.
>  
>    it took, literally, *minutes* just to format the two filesystems.
>  right now, it's sitting at the first SW install screen, where it's
>  been for the last 10 minutes, even though the VMM reports that that VM
>  is using 49% CPU.
>  
>    should i expect this kind of performance?  because, as it stands,
>  this is completely unusable.  so i'm assuming i'm doing something
>  wrong, and i'm open to suggestions. 
Sounds like you are not using KVM even though its loaded....

Can you provide the output of 'virsh capabilities' and  for the guest
in question 'virsh dumpxml GUESTNAME'

Daniel
-- 
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London   -o-   http://people.redhat.com/berrange/
:|
|: http://libvirt.org  -o-  http://virt-manager.org  -o-  http://ovirt.org
:|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/
:|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505  -o-  F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505
:|

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[Mark McLoughlin]

Robert, Mike,

Please get this into bugzilla with as much details as possible. See:

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Reporting_virtualization_bugs

for the kind of info that would be helpful.

Additionally, if you could do e.g.

  $> tcpdump -i vnet0 -p -w vnet0.dump

on the host and then use:

  $> wireshark vnet0.dump

to see is there any unusual network traffic - you might find that some
packets are highlighted in black or red.

FWIW, I installed an f11 beta guest on a rawhide host today and didn't
see any issues.

(Robert - see my previous mails to Mike. It would help if you could
figure out whether this is a network slowness issue rather than the
whole guest being slow. Also, seeing if an F10 guest install works would
be good.)

Thanks,
Mark.