[mythtv-users] Processor Recommendations?

[Jarod Wilson]

Nick Morrott wrote:
> On 09/02/07, John Pierce <john.j35 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Screw xen. kvm is where its at, if you have support for hardware
>>> virtualization... :)
>>>
>>> However, fwiw, xen works WAAAAY better in RHEL5, that's where our
>>> engineering focus has been for the most part over the past few months.
>>> That'll trickle down to FC6 and Fedora 7 soon though. Don't know exactly
>>> how it compares to VMWare performance.
>>>
>> Ok, Jarod, does any Turion X2 support hardware virtualization.  I did
>> read about the kvm bit a couple of days ago and I thought it looked
>> promising.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD-V
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turion_64_X2
> 
> From the articles it appears all Turion 64 X2 processors contain the
> AMD Virtualization Technology.

What Nick said. Personally, I've only played with xen and kvm on Intel 
implementations to date. I believe support for Intel hardware is more 
mature, but AMD shouldn't be far behind.

What I really REALLY like about kvm over xen, especially for a laptop, 
is that you run a standard kernel as the hypervisor, instead of some 
other beast (i.e., the xen hypervisor). Among other things, cpu 
frequency scaling is  a load of crap under xen -- the dom0 and domU's 
have no knowledge of one another's cpu usage, so frequency scaling can't 
happen sanely. With kvm, guests are just processes, so frequency scaling 
Just Works. Same with stuff like acpi, suspend, etc. that is either 
non-functional or only partially implemented under xen.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com