Using Virtual Machine Hosting in LInux (Puppyland)

[gcmartin]

To use Puppy Linux as a host for Virtual Machine (VM) clients, w things MUST be present so that host system can give very adequate performance from the VM clients they boot. You MUST have

• a CPU that has the VT hardware feature
• a Linux kernel that is gen'd to take advantage of this hardware feature of the CPU

These 2 things can be tested for to help you determine if your PC with Linux.

There are tools necessary for determining the capability of your system.
One of them (CPU tool) can be found here
I am unsure of what fields/flags are present for acknowledging kernel feature for this.

Please update this thread with helpful approaches for Puppylanders.

[TheAsterisk!]

One quick note. While having either of those hardware features will certainly help, you can often get by simply by ensuring that you have enough RAM for both the host and guest system simultaneously and a decent processor speed.

I run many VMs on a laptop with just 1 GB of memory and a Centrino Duo 2-core processor @ 2 GHz. No VT-x feature at all. Then again, it depends on what you want to do in the VM, what guest OS you want to run, and whether or not you want to do a whole lot in the host while the guest is still running. I'm usually running pretty svelte guest systems like FreeDOS or another Puppy release, so I'm probably not taxing my hardware too much.

With my hardware specs in mind, WinXP is about the most it can handle in a guest OS, and mostly for productivity applications. Still, if you have an older beast that you've added a ton of memory to, and the processor speed isn't bad, you can get away with a lot outside of VT-x or AMD-V.

[01micko]

VMs work fine in the latest Slacko dev version.

For the next version though I have enabled the VM kernel drivers. IDK what difference they will make but soon folks will be able to test.

Code: Select all

CONFIG_HAVE_KVM=y
CONFIG_HAVE_KVM_IRQCHIP=y
CONFIG_HAVE_KVM_EVENTFD=y
CONFIG_KVM_APIC_ARCHITECTURE=y
CONFIG_KVM_MMIO=y
CONFIG_KVM_ASYNC_PF=y
CONFIG_VIRTUALIZATION=y
CONFIG_KVM=m
CONFIG_KVM_INTEL=m
CONFIG_KVM_AMD=m
CONFIG_VHOST_NET=m
CONFIG_LGUEST=m

It might make a difference when compiling the VirtualBox kernel modules.