[OT] Virtualization (WAS: UNIX V7)

[Eric Smith]

Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
> Someone told me that VMware still emulates some of the instructions that 
> could be virtualized either because they are buggy or slow. Don't take 
> my word for it though.
>
>   
At one point, VMware added support for the hardware virtualization 
features from AMD and Intel, but by default it was disabled, because it 
was often slower than their existing software approach.  In AMD's recent 
processors (Barcelona and newer), they've added enhancements to AMD-V 
such as nested page tables and the IOMMU, which are supposed to improve 
the performance of hypervisors, but I don't know whether VMware 
currently takes advantage of them.