Re: Speed of qemu VM sharing the store

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com> skribis:

> Am 11.11.2017 um 12:31 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
>>> Since a vm (sharing the host store) is unacceptable sloooooow,
>> Could you be more specific?  I understand from Chris Baines’ measurement
>> some time ago that it’s definitely slower than a bare-metal system, but
>> I don’t find it “unacceptably slow” when it comes to testing stuff like
>> this (it’s definitely faster than building a standalone image with ‘guix
>> system vm-image’ anyway!).
>>
> See my posting at
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2017-10/msg00185.html>:
>
> When sharing the host's store ("guix system vm …"), Plasma takes 80
> seconds (minimum) to start up after log-in to X11, when clicking the
> menu-button, it takes 36 sec. for the menu to appear. This plain renders
> such a VM unusable even for testing.

OK, that’s terrible indeed.  So that’s with ‘-enable-kvm’ on the qemu
command line, right?

> YMMV, but I call this in-acceptable and this is why I'm using a vm-image
> ("guix system vm-image …", which is much faster: Plase start-up 25 sec.,
> Menu appears immediately.

25 seconds to start up is still a lot (in ‘guix system vm’ GNOME is
usable and much faster to start).  It would be nice to see if that comes
from I/O or something else.  Is there something we’re doing wrong
(independently of the VM) or is it expected for Plasma startup to be
this slow?

Ludo’.