Post your Passmark results of your Windows VM

[kgeorgeg7]

I forgot the passmark result:

[Shunjoss]

Please note that I have 2 R9 280X both of them work nicely, and I have played some games with some friends when they come over. Usually League of Legends, Dota 2 and Battlefield 4. Yes i7 3770 manages to run 2 games at the same time !

I run a VM with my main Windows 7 VM ( I name it win7_primary ) and my second Windows 7 VM ( I name it win7_secondary ). Each of, has a R9 280X for itself. When I use both the VMs for Gaming I let the VMs 7GiB of RAM to each.

Wow all that power in one computer :p.
Just to say, DOTA 2 has a Linux version : what an awesome game I already have played hours(ssss). Just download it on steam.

PS : As you say, it's not obvious if you play dota in a vm or not.

[kgeorgeg7]

Please note that I have 2 R9 280X both of them work nicely, and I have played some games with some friends when they come over. Usually League of Legends, Dota 2 and Battlefield 4. Yes i7 3770 manages to run 2 games at the same time !

I run a VM with my main Windows 7 VM ( I name it win7_primary ) and my second Windows 7 VM ( I name it win7_secondary ). Each of, has a R9 280X for itself. When I use both the VMs for Gaming I let the VMs 7GiB of RAM to each.

Wow all that power in one computer :p.
Just to say, DOTA 2 has a Linux version : what an awesome game I already have played hours(ssss). Just download it on steam.

PS : As you say, it's not obvious if you play dota in a vm or not.

I mainly play Dota 2 on Linux (ofc !) but when I want a bit better graphics than my Intel HD 4000 I load the VM to play there. I don't want to mess with catalyst drivers on Linux (yet).

But in general, I play most games on Linux when they support it. If only League of Legends was available for Linux, I would seriously had no reason to use Windows !

[Shunjoss]

You have a lot of memory on your /home drive :p. If you have two windows 7 (vm) + Linux installed + 2 dota. It does 62 Go already !
For my part I have a Nvidia GTX 760 with an intel i5-4670k, Dota works fine with the Nvidia driver.
I'm more a Nvidia/intel fan : because they have good support in general for OSes.
Anyway if i remember the titan cost the price of 2 R9. So.

If only League of Legends was available for Linux, I would seriously had no reason to use Windows !

Sure we all have a little thing in Windows who miss us, but certainly not Windows : it is often an app or hardware support.
I hope that the steam machine will be released soon with the steam os too. Like that video game producers will move their ass to do a Linux version of their games !

[powerhouse]

@kgeorgeg7: Thanks for remembering to post the passmark results and for sharing your setup details - the results are awesome! I really like the 3d passmark (graphics card). Your configuration is an excellent example for a gaming station. I suppose the high CPU benchmark is the result of running the benchmark in only one VM, while the others are more or less idle (unless you did VCPU pinning). I find Xen very powerful when it comes to allocating CPU resources where needed.

Even though I now use the xl toolstack on my PC, I keep using the xm toolstack in the how-to and I believe for a good reason: the xm toolstack is more likely to work. Glad you can confirm that.

In the meantime I have also had a chance to play with KVM and I do consider it now a possible alternative to Xen, though documentation could be better. However, since Xen has been rock stable ever since I installed it more than 2 years ago, I have little reason to switch. Enjoy your dual headed gaming PC.

[powerhouse]

You have a lot of memory on your /home drive :p. If you have two windows 7 (vm) + Linux installed + 2 dota. It does 62 Go already !
For my part I have a Nvidia GTX 760 with an intel i5-4670k, Dota works fine with the Nvidia driver.
I'm more a Nvidia/intel fan : because they have good support in general for OSes.
Anyway if i remember the titan cost the price of 2 R9. So.

If only League of Legends was available for Linux, I would seriously had no reason to use Windows !

Sure we all have a little thing in Windows who miss us, but certainly not Windows : it is often an app or hardware support.
I hope that the steam machine will be released soon with the steam os too. Like that video game producers will move their ass to do a Linux version of their games !

Unfortunately Nvidia seems to be about the worst pick for Xen VGA passthrough, and it's not the fault of the Xen team. Nvidia seems to have made an effort to make their graphics cards unusable for Xen, unless you buy the expensive "multi-OS" line of cards starting with the Quadro 2000 and Quadro 4000 at horrendous prices. There is a very popular thread on an Australian electronics forum where Nvidia users hack their consumer-grade graphics adapters to make them fool the Nvidia drivers in thinking they are the professional counterpart.

You should also note that your CPU does NOT support VT-d and is thus unsuitable for VGA passthrough, the main ingredient for high-performance VMs. Most Intel xxxxK CPUs don't support VT-d, only the 3930K, 3960K, 4930K, 4960K etc. top models. You can check it on the Intel website to be sure.

[Shunjoss]

I don't know, i never ever heard of that. Although i don't know what xenvga and vt-d is.
Is this only on high end cpu ? Or on high end GPU ?
Because my config. in my opinion is an (high-)mid config.
I never tried a vm yet on this computer.

is vt-d something near to vt-x?

[PatH57]

There is a very popular thread on an Australian electronics forum where Nvidia users hack their consumer-grade graphics adapters to make them fool the Nvidia drivers in thinking they are the professional counterpart.

As far as I remember this has always been the case with nvidia and the quadro line of graphic cards. I used to patch them to get full opengl or cuda to work on them.

[Shunjoss]

So with the basic propriatory driver in mint i can't get my gpu works at full capacity ?

[PatH57]

your GPU is not an nvidia quadro so no worries the provided nvidia driver is ok

[Shunjoss]

ty

[powerhouse]

Oh my - I sidetracked my own thread. This thread is supposed to be about VM benchmark results, to show potential users how feasible a VM solution can be for their application, in particular for Windows VMs used for gaming or graphics intensive applications.

With regard to VT-d and VT-x, as well as Nvidia versus AMD, the following thread should give a good starting point: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=112013. The answers above are not all correct - Nvidia Quadro 2000 and higher cards work with VGA passthrough, the consumer cards usually don't work. Also not all AMD cards are equally easy to pass through, some work better, some less. They also got other issues with card reset etc. Again, the above thread should provide answers.

Hope to see more benchmarks here.

[Nesousx]

Hi,

Here is a new benchmark, however I am no longer on Xen nor Mint, but I wanted to share my result here.

Passmark gives me a total score of 3771: http://www.passmark.com/baselines/V8/di ... 1620815621

I am running Arch Linux and KVM on the following hardware:

CPU: Intel i5-3570 (4 VCPUs passed to win7 guest)
MB: Asrock Z77 Pro-m Fatal1ty
RAM: 32Gb (host) and 16Gb (win7 guest)
Graphics (Linux): intel integrated with CPU
Graphics (Windows): AMD Radeon 7950
Disk (Linux OS): Crucial MX100 128GB SSD
Disk (Windows VM): M500 3 960GB SSD

In the first page of this topic, I posted a 3009 points with Ubuntu + Xen. However I had a different SSD for guest, a little less memory allocated to guest and only 3 vcpus too. Just to you know. So far I am very happy with VGA passthrough and even happier with KVM than I used to be with Xen.

[thehappygrub]

Xen 4.4 Distro Rel
Debian
Fx8350 Eight Cores Host and Guest
6098Gb Ram - thats all that will run on stable
r9-280x 4Gb ,quadro 7800 as secondary card-host
Asrock 970 Extreme4+
Win8 -64
Modified amdkmdag,ram and scheduling parameters as per my post http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? ... st13000378
2 Monitors on the r9 280x when running benchmark,3rd monitor on the quadro ,could have been higher if one slightly.
12 Months stable except when updating ! xen.

The benchmarks are with a slight o/c on fsb of 202 no voltage mods ,which isnt 24/7 stable when gaming heavy directx,but 24/7 for all other work ,ok on other directx,due to Xen and passthrough.
The machine is more stable with the ram at 1333Mhz and not 1866 or 2133,especially the atikmdap issue.

CPU Score = 6079
3D Score = 4627

[powerhouse]

Now that I run my Windows 7 VM on Xen 4.4 and Linux Mint 17.1 on a new Samsung SSD 850 EVO, I reran the benchmark tests with the latest PassMark 8 benchmarking software. Unfortunately the results are not as good as they were before, specifically the CPU benchmark! The CPU benchmark is 16% lower than what it used to be - 9996 now versus 11906. When running Windows on the same hardware on bare metal, my CPU gets an average CPU mark of 12103, which means the result is 17.4% lower than bare metal . Something is wrong here.

I am still searching for explanations. It seems that the CPU benchmark doesn't make use of all the CPU resources available. When running the benchmark, most of the CPU-related tests run only at 50-85% CPU utilization, as shown on the CPU usage applet.

Here the link to the benchmark results: http://www.passmark.com/baselines/V8/di ... 1911043459. The passmark rating is now 3788.

cpu10.png

[powerhouse]

Recently I switched from Xen to kvm. I've been a happy Xen user for about 3 1/2 years and I couldn't complain about performance, nor did I have issues. BUT, I was fed up with the poor performance of my AMD 7770 card for dom0. I also wanted to get a more powerful GPU for the Windows VM and chose a Nvidia card - the GTX 970. Long story short: I needed kvm to support the Nvidia Quadro under Linux and the GTX 970 under Windows.

I didn't manage to install Windows 7 with UEFI, so I decided to use the free upgrade and try Windows 10. The installation was easy. BUT it took some time to get the VM performance up on par with Xen (well, sort of).

Passmark 8 rating: 3941

The weakest parts are the CPU floating point and 2D performance. The latter might be a driver issue, as 3D performance is fantastic. I managed to improve disk performance by using the -machine type=q35,accel=kvm option (see below). The top entry (blue bar) is from my old Xen installation running Windows 7, and using a Sandisk Extreme 120GB SSD and a Quadro 2000 GPU for the VM.

20151229-machinetypeq35.jpg

My current system:
i7 3930K 6-core Intel CPU
Nvidia GTX 970 graphics card (VM)
32GB memory, 20GB for the VM
Hugepages configured
Windows 10 Pro 64bit VM (fresh install)
Latest virtio drivers installed in Windows
OVMF UEFI boot from latest package (edk2.git-ovmf-x64-0-20151229.b1407.gf396477.noarch.rpm)
qemu-system-x86_64 2.1.2

Here the start script:

Code: Select all

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -name $vmname,process=$vmname \
  -machine type=q35,accel=kvm \
  -cpu host,kvm=off \
  -smp 10,sockets=1,cores=5,threads=2 \
  -enable-kvm \
  -m 20G \
  -mem-path /dev/hugepages \
  -mem-prealloc \
  -balloon none \
  -rtc clock=host,base=utc \
  -vga none \
  -nographic \
  -serial null \
  -parallel none \
  -device vfio-pci,host=02:00.0,multifunction=on \
  -device vfio-pci,host=02:00.1 \
  -device vfio-pci,host=00:1a.0 \
  -device vfio-pci,host=08:00.0 \
  -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/usr/share/edk2.git/ovmf-x64/OVMF_CODE-pure-efi.fd \
  -drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=/tmp/my_vars.fd \
  -boot order=c \
  -device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi \
  -drive id=disk0,if=virtio,cache=none,format=raw,file=/dev/mapper/lm13-win10 \
  -drive id=disk1,if=virtio,cache=none,file=/dev/mapper/photos-photo_stripe \
  -drive id=disk2,if=virtio,cache=none,file=/dev/mapper/media-photo_raw \
  -net nic,model=virtio,macaddr=00:16:3e:00:07:07 -net tap

As always with these things, it's trial and error. The documentation still lacks far behind the kvm/qemu development, though some efforts have been made.

[powerhouse]

Here the CPU performance (for summary see above):

20151229-machinetypeq35-cpu-small.jpg

The first bar (blue) is my previous Xen-based Windows 7 VM. There are some obvious CPU performance issues, namely integer math and floating point. I don't know if this is misconfiguration (quite possible as I'm a newbie to kvm), or a real issue.

Can any one point me in the right direction?

[powerhouse]

It took some tweaking to get good disk (SSD) performance. The results below are more or less on par with bare metal installations. The top graph (blue) is my previous Xen-based Windows 7 VM using a Sandisk Extreme 120GB SSD drive.

20151229-machinetypeq35-disk.jpg

Without the -machine type=q35,accel=kvm (or type=pc) I would get dismal disk performance: 115 for sequential read, write performance was OK, but random RW was terrible. Mind you, this is a Samsung EVO 850 250GB SSD drive.

Does anybody have another suggestion to get disk performance in shape, without the -machine option? I'm not sure if that is what I want. The idea for this tweak came from here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QE ... too_slowly

[powerhouse]

Here the 2D graphics results with my Nvidia GTX 970. I don't know why they are so low, could be a driver issue (I run the latest Nvidia driver).

20151229-machinetypeq35-2d.jpg

The top graph shows my Nvidia Quadro 2000 in a Xen environment (see previous posts).

[powerhouse]

And finally the 3D results for the Nvidia GTX 970. These are good, can't complain.

20151229-machinetypeq35-3d.jpg

The benchmarks are obtained while running Windows 10 in a qemu-kvm VM. With these results you can definitely run almost any game on this virtual machine .