Hi, I am also facing the same issue but with an XP Pro guest that was working fine under Jaunty. Even with only one cpu enabled the vm is almost unusable with the cpu continually at 100%. Need a fix soon or it's back to 9.04 for me

Mark, filing an SR couldn't hurt -- while hopefullly we'll update the thread with good news at some point, if that good news comes in the form of a new revision of Workstation we wouldn't be able to announce it until it's already public knowledge. Sorry, that's just company policy on unannounced products.

It's also possible good news comes in the form of Linux kernel updates. I'm not trying to cast the blame over there, but the Linux kernel community has recently been discussing changes in scheduler behavior noticed in 2.6.31 and maybe they'll decide to make changes that benefit us.

I don't think any other distro has shipped a 2.6.31 kernel yet, though Fedora 12 is about to, and I'd expect to see the same issue there.

At the risk of stating the obvious, none of these brand-new (or future) distro releases are currently qualified as supported host OSes for Workstation, though of course we know people want them and we're working on it.

We know it's not the filesystem. (We've tried Ubuntu 9.04 with ext4, and we've tried various 2.6.31 kernels with ext3.)

And we don't actually know that the performance problem is when pcpu==vcpu -- the variant I'm familiar with is with 2 vcpus on a 2 pcpu host, and we have one data point here that 1 vcpu VM was also slow (but we don't yet know that was a 1 pcpu host, and it could be an unrelated problem), but let's not assume that's the explanation.

It's a dual core laptop. Although I may have to revise my symptoms as it appears that another XP guest works fine with 1 vCPU but not with 2 vCPU. My initial report was from working with my main XP guest which I use for work (with 2 x 20GB harddrives) which is almost unusable with either 1 or 2 vCPU's enabled.