Binary Windows guest drivers are released

Binary Windows guest drivers are released

[Yan Vugenfirer]

Hello All,

I am happy to announce that the Windows guest drivers binaries are
released.

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers


Best regards,
Yan Vugenfirer.

Re: Binary Windows guest drivers are released

[Glennie Vignarajah]

Le Thursday 24 September 2009 vers 15:13, Yan Vugenfirer("Yan 
Vugenfirer" <yvugenfi@redhat.com>) a écrit:
> Hello All,

Hi,

> 
> I am happy to announce that the Windows guest drivers binaries are
> released.
> http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers

Wonderfull...
I've using them on XP and W2K3. They are working like a charm.
Thank you and many thanks to Red hat for releasing these drivers.
Regards,
-- 
http://www.glennie.fr
If the only tool you have is hammer, you tend to see every problem as 
a nail.

Re: Binary Windows guest drivers are released

[Kenni Lund]

2009/9/24 Yan Vugenfirer <yvugenfi@redhat.com>:
> Hello All,
>
> I am happy to announce that the Windows guest drivers binaries are
> released.

Thank you, I've been waiting for this for quite a while :)

I've done some benchmarking with the drivers on Windows XP SP3 32bit,
but it seems like using the VirtIO drivers are slower than the IDE drivers in
(almost) all cases. Perhaps I've missed something or does the driver still
need optimization?

I created two raw images of 5GB and attached them to a WinXP SP3
virtual machine with:
"-drive file=virtio.img,if=virtio -drive file=ide.img,if=ide"

I installed the VirtIO drivers, rebooted, formatted the new virtual HDDs with
NTFS and downloaded IOMeter. Three different test were run; database
workload ("Default" in IOmeter), maximum read throughput and maximum
write throughput (settings taken from IOmeter documentation). All results
are the average of two individual runs of the test. Each test ran for 3 minutes.

--
Typical database workload
("default" in Iometer: 2kb, 67% read, 33% write, 100% random, 0% sequential)
--
Total I/Os per sec:
IDE: 86,67
VirtIO: 66,84

Total MBs per second:
IDE: 0,17MB/sec
VirtIO: 0,13MB/sec

Average I/O response time:
IDE: 11,59ms
VirtIO: 14,96ms

Maximum I/O response time:
IDE: 177,06ms
VirtIO: 244,52ms

% CPU Utilization:
IDE: 3,15%
VirtIO: 2,55%

--
Maximum reading throughput
(64kb, 100% read, 0% write, 0% random, 100% sequential)
--
Total I/Os per sec:
IDE: 3266,17
VirtIO: 2694,34

Total MBs per second:
IDE: 204,14MB/sec
VirtIO: 168,40MB/sec

Average I/O response time:
IDE: 0,3053ms
VirtIO: 0,3710ms

Maximum I/O response time:
IDE: 210,60ms
VirtIO: 180,65ms

% CPU Utilization:
IDE: 70,4%
VirtIO: 55,66%

--
Maximum writing throughput
(64kb, 0% read, 100% write, 0% random, 100% sequential)
--
Total I/Os per sec:
IDE: 258,92
VirtIO: 123,69

Total MBs per second:
IDE: 16,18MB/sec
VirtIO: 7,74MB/sec

Average I/O response time:
IDE: 3,89ms
VirtIO: 8,17ms

Maximum I/O response time:
IDE: 241,99ms
VirtIO: 838,19ms

% CPU Utilization:
IDE: 8,21%
VirtIO: 4,88%

This was tested on a Arch Linux host with kernel 2.6.30.6 64bit and kvm-88.
One CPU and 2GB of RAM was assigned to the virtual machine.

Is this expected behaviour?

Thanks again for your effort on the VirtIO drivers :)

Best Regards
Kenni Lund

Re: Binary Windows guest drivers are released

[Javier Guerra]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Kenni Lund <kenni@kelu.dk> wrote:
> I've done some benchmarking with the drivers on Windows XP SP3 32bit,
> but it seems like using the VirtIO drivers are slower than the IDE drivers in
> (almost) all cases. Perhaps I've missed something or does the driver still
> need optimization?

very interesting!

it seems that IDE wins on all the performance numbers, but VirtIO
always has lower CPU utilization.  i guess this is guest CPU %, right?
it would also be interesting to compare the CPU usage from the host
point of view, since a lower 'off-guest' CPU usage is very important
for scaling to many guests doing I/O.

-- 
Javier

Re: Binary Windows guest drivers are released

[Dor Laor]

On 09/24/2009 11:59 PM, Javier Guerra wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Kenni Lund<kenni@kelu.dk>  wrote:
>> I've done some benchmarking with the drivers on Windows XP SP3 32bit,
>> but it seems like using the VirtIO drivers are slower than the IDE drivers in
>> (almost) all cases. Perhaps I've missed something or does the driver still
>> need optimization?
>
> very interesting!
>
> it seems that IDE wins on all the performance numbers, but VirtIO
> always has lower CPU utilization.  i guess this is guest CPU %, right?
> it would also be interesting to compare the CPU usage from the host
> point of view, since a lower 'off-guest' CPU usage is very important
> for scaling to many guests doing I/O.
>

Can you re-try it with setting the host ioscheduler to deadline?
Virtio backend (thread pool) is sensitive for it.

These drivers are mainly tweaked for win2k3 and win2k8. We once had 
queue depth settings in the driver, not sure we still have it, Vadim, 
can you add more info?

Also virtio should provide IO parallelism as opposed to IDE. I don't 
think your test test it. Virtio can provide more virtual drives than the 
max 4 that ide offers.

Dor

Re: Binary Windows guest drivers are released

[Vadim Rozenfeld]

On 09/25/2009 12:07 AM, Dor Laor wrote:
> On 09/24/2009 11:59 PM, Javier Guerra wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Kenni Lund<kenni@kelu.dk>  wrote:
>>> I've done some benchmarking with the drivers on Windows XP SP3 32bit,
>>> but it seems like using the VirtIO drivers are slower than the IDE 
>>> drivers in
>>> (almost) all cases. Perhaps I've missed something or does the driver 
>>> still
>>> need optimization?
>>
>> very interesting!
>>
>> it seems that IDE wins on all the performance numbers, but VirtIO
>> always has lower CPU utilization.  i guess this is guest CPU %, right?
>> it would also be interesting to compare the CPU usage from the host
>> point of view, since a lower 'off-guest' CPU usage is very important
>> for scaling to many guests doing I/O.
>>
>
> Can you re-try it with setting the host ioscheduler to deadline?
> Virtio backend (thread pool) is sensitive for it.
>
> These drivers are mainly tweaked for win2k3 and win2k8. We once had 
> queue depth settings in the driver, not sure we still have it, Vadim, 
> can you add more info?
>
> Also virtio should provide IO parallelism as opposed to IDE. I don't 
> think your test test it. Virtio can provide more virtual drives than 
> the max 4 that ide offers.
>
> Dor
Windows XP 32-bit virtio block driver was created from our mainline code 
almost for fun.
Not like our mainline code, which is STORPORT oriented, it is a SCSIPORT 
(!!!!) mini-port driver.
SCSIPORT has never been known as I/O optimized storage stack.
SCSIPORT architecture is almost dead officially.
Windows XP 32-bit has no support for STORPORT or virtual storage stack.
Developing monolithic disk driver, which will sit right on top of 
virtio-blk PCI device, looks like the one way
to have some kind of high throughput storage for Windows XP 32-bit.

Regards,
Vadim.

Re: Binary Windows guest drivers are released

[Kenni Lund]

2009/9/25 Vadim Rozenfeld <vrozenfe@redhat.com>:
> On 09/25/2009 12:07 AM, Dor Laor wrote:
>>
>> On 09/24/2009 11:59 PM, Javier Guerra wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Kenni Lund<kenni@kelu.dk>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I've done some benchmarking with the drivers on Windows XP SP3 32bit,
>>>> but it seems like using the VirtIO drivers are slower than the IDE
>>>> drivers in
>>>> (almost) all cases. Perhaps I've missed something or does the driver
>>>> still
>>>> need optimization?
>>>
>>> very interesting!
>>>
>>> it seems that IDE wins on all the performance numbers, but VirtIO
>>> always has lower CPU utilization.  i guess this is guest CPU %, right?
>>> it would also be interesting to compare the CPU usage from the host
>>> point of view, since a lower 'off-guest' CPU usage is very important
>>> for scaling to many guests doing I/O.
>>>
>> These drivers are mainly tweaked for win2k3 and win2k8. We once had queue
>> depth settings in the driver, not sure we still have it, Vadim, can you add
>> more info?
>> Dor
>
> Windows XP 32-bit virtio block driver was created from our mainline code
> almost for fun.
> Not like our mainline code, which is STORPORT oriented, it is a SCSIPORT
> (!!!!) mini-port driver.
> SCSIPORT has never been known as I/O optimized storage stack.
> SCSIPORT architecture is almost dead officially.
> Windows XP 32-bit has no support for STORPORT or virtual storage stack.

Ok, in that case, wouldn't it be better simply not to build the XP driver and
instead put a note somewhere (in the wiki?), saying that it doesn't make
sense to use VirtIO on XP due to these reasons?

> Developing monolithic disk driver, which will sit right on top of virtio-blk
> PCI device, looks like the one way
> to have some kind of high throughput storage for Windows XP 32-bit.

Ok, since these drivers are targeted Windows Server and XP is getting old,
I suppose no efforts will be put into developing such driver, or?

Best Regards,
Kenni

Re: Binary Windows guest drivers are released

[Vadim Rozenfeld]

On 09/25/2009 10:53 AM, Kenni Lund wrote:
> 2009/9/25 Vadim Rozenfeld<vrozenfe@redhat.com>:
>    
>> On 09/25/2009 12:07 AM, Dor Laor wrote:
>>      
>>> On 09/24/2009 11:59 PM, Javier Guerra wrote:
>>>        
>>>> On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Kenni Lund<kenni@kelu.dk>    wrote:
>>>>          
>>>>> I've done some benchmarking with the drivers on Windows XP SP3 32bit,
>>>>> but it seems like using the VirtIO drivers are slower than the IDE
>>>>> drivers in
>>>>> (almost) all cases. Perhaps I've missed something or does the driver
>>>>> still
>>>>> need optimization?
>>>>>            
>>>> very interesting!
>>>>
>>>> it seems that IDE wins on all the performance numbers, but VirtIO
>>>> always has lower CPU utilization.  i guess this is guest CPU %, right?
>>>> it would also be interesting to compare the CPU usage from the host
>>>> point of view, since a lower 'off-guest' CPU usage is very important
>>>> for scaling to many guests doing I/O.
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> These drivers are mainly tweaked for win2k3 and win2k8. We once had queue
>>> depth settings in the driver, not sure we still have it, Vadim, can you add
>>> more info?
>>> Dor
>>>        
>> Windows XP 32-bit virtio block driver was created from our mainline code
>> almost for fun.
>> Not like our mainline code, which is STORPORT oriented, it is a SCSIPORT
>> (!!!!) mini-port driver.
>> SCSIPORT has never been known as I/O optimized storage stack.
>> SCSIPORT architecture is almost dead officially.
>> Windows XP 32-bit has no support for STORPORT or virtual storage stack.
>>      
> Ok, in that case, wouldn't it be better simply not to build the XP driver and
> instead put a note somewhere (in the wiki?), saying that it doesn't make
> sense to use VirtIO on XP due to these reasons?
>    
I have no idea what was the reason for building and announcing XP 32bit 
driver.
I mean, technically it is possible. You can also expect less CPU 
consumption by switching
to SCSIPORT virtio driver. But please don't expect any significant 
performance burst.
>    
>> Developing monolithic disk driver, which will sit right on top of virtio-blk
>> PCI device, looks like the one way
>> to have some kind of high throughput storage for Windows XP 32-bit.
>>      
> Ok, since these drivers are targeted Windows Server and XP is getting old,
> I suppose no efforts will be put into developing such driver, or?
>    
I don't know, but why not? It shouldn't be too complicated.
> Best Regards,
> Kenni
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