QEMU I have doubts about HW resources

Hardware
1

I made a new purchase and was hoping to use IPFIRE in GW with also 1 virtualization with QEMU,
IPFire 2.25 (x86_64) - Core Update 153
I installed everything perfect …

I vitualize with QEMU 1 win 7 to x64 but I have very low performance … to start win7 it takes at least 8 minutes … and then it remains unusable …
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The HW is as follows …
Intel Celeron J1900 processor, quad-core, 2.42GHz;
8Gb of DDR3L RAM
mSATA SSD
4x Intel WGI211AT Gigabit Ethernet NIC
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it being understood that the HW overall is not the best, but I was hoping to run at least 1 virtualization …
my start parameters for QEMU are these …

qemu-system-x86_64 -vnc: 1 -smp cores = 4 -k it -drive file = / mnt / samba / hd / so / w7.img, format = raw, index = 0, media = disk -m 2047 -net nic -net user -boot c -usbdevice tablet

also I am in a Gigabit Ethernet NIC but I have very low troughput to copy files at max 6 Mb / sec.

the question is what did I do wrong? or are the characteristics of the mini PC placed in GW that are not enough?

4

Hi @stefanenkog

I am using virtually the same spec but with only 4GB DDR3 RAM for my IPFire but I have no VM’s on it.

I use VirtualBox for an IPFire test bed VM on an Intel i5-8400 system with 6 cores. When I have a few VM’s running I see a slow down in everything. I am not sure how VirtualBox compares to QEMU for VM’s. I have no experience with QEMU.

I would suspect that your hardware might be too limited or certainly marginal.

htop is available as an addon in IPFire. That might be useful to compare the loads with and without the VM running. You might then be able to see if the problem is cpu or i/o or other.

5

Yes htop I’m using it … to keep the loads under control, QEMU definitely loads the CPU but not saturates it, and I don’t understand why I have virtualized win7 which has very poor performance …
and then also the network troughput in virtualization and very scarce …
bho … I can’t give myself an excuse …

6

I am sorry that I can’t help further as I don’t have experience with QEMU.

There will be others who do who can probably help more specifically.

7

IMVHO virtualizing with “only” a J1900 is not the best way for optimize performances.
I’d use bare hardware if i am the owner of the board.

8

add “-enable-kvm” to the commandline. If qemu now not start check if the bios disable CPU Virtualisation features.

Without KVM qemu is slow…

1 Like
9

Arne,
with “-enable-kvm” it is much better … even the network speed …
now I have to correctly configure the automatic start after IPFIRE start … I hope to succeed … it should be quite easy because QEMU I run it on Green0

Thanks 1000

10

Try install with this:
https://virt-manager.org/

For me it is working.