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Comment by Scramblejams | Hacker News Reader

Does this point the way for better disk performance for potentially all VM software? VirtualBox and Xen sure leave me cold when it comes to I/O. (Disclaimer: I haven't tried the alternatives, so I'm not really calling them out specifically.)

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This is ultimately about scalability. To achieve this kind of IOP rate, you need to be able to scale very large guests very well. KVM has always been exceptionally good at this and QEMU was really the bottle neck. We've now overcome this problem in QEMU (at least for block performance).

KVM is able to achieve this level of scalability because it leverages Linux which is already very good at scaling to large systems. I wouldn't expect this kind of scalability from other hypervisors any time soon.

Not just Linux. This announcement makes SmartOS even that much more attractive an option?

For anyone who needs background on this-

SmartOS: virtualization with ZFS and KVM https://lwn.net/Articles/459754/

So... does this preclude enjoying this sort of speed-boost on *BSD (I care about NetBSD specifically).

I'm a KVM user (snd ex-Xen early adopter) but not very knowledgeable about all this. (I'm using VMs because I need them to test software in different environments)

Does this latest QEMU patch have implications for KVM? Will KVM "Linux inside Linux" and "Windows inside Linux" virtual machines be now faster under KVM thanks to this latest QEMU patch? And if so, why?

(thanks for all the good work to the QEMU and KVM teams btw)

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