I’m running OpenSUSE 15.3 on top of KVM type 1 hypervisor (headless KVM host). OpenSUSE VM is using VGA passthrough and performs reasonably well itself. I mean I didn’t perform any benchmarks but it feels like bare metal.
I’m trying however to run VirtualBox lab VMs inside this OpenSUSE VDI workstation and… it’s not so hot.
Before 15.3 I tried to run 13.1 but it was very old OpenSUSE and it had very old VirtualBox (5.0) which turned out to not really support nested virtualization and performance was quite terrible. So I switched to 15.3 which has VBox 6.1.26, which does support nested virtualization and now performance is…
still terrible tbf.
I mean yeah it’s a bit better but not really night and day kind of difference. Running Chrome inside nested Windows 10 VM is fairly bad experience. I’m getting like 20 fps on 720p video on YouTube and overall it’s very stuttery and unpleasant experience.
Host is Threadripper PRO 5965WX with 256GB RAM. Level 1 VM uses CPU architecture passthrough, has enabled nested virtualization, 1GB huge pages, memlock, statically pinned CPU cores, PCIe passthrough (GPU + NVME).
VirtualBox VMs reside on NVME SSDs passed through as PCIe devices.
Specs of chain:
host:
Arch Linux
24/48 cores/threads
256GB RAM (128GB locked as hugepages)
4x NVME RAID10 for VM images
level1 guest (libvirt):
OpenSUSE 15.3
12/24 cores/threads (host-passthrough, emulatorpin, iothread, topoext, tec-deadline)
64GB RAM (hugepages, nosharepages, memlock)
Quadro RTX 4000, pci-e passthrough
root disk storage as qemu qcow2 image on host storage
VBox vm images storage on 2x NVME RAID1, pci-e passthrough
level2 guest (VirtualBox 6.1.26):
Windows 10
12 vCPU, PAE/NX, Nested VT-x/AMD-V, Nested Paging, acceleration KVM
16GB RAM
VMSVGA, 3d acceleration enabled, 128mb (max supported)
OpenSUSE 15.5 guest performs slightly better than Windows 10 but it’s still terrible. The worst offender tho is Android 8 VM which runs like dogsh*t and gets like idk, 2fps on desktop. Barely functioning.