Hi all,
Just wondering if anyone has experienced similar issues to what me and two other people are seeing with the latest Workstation (8.0.2):
Check out http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?69222-VMware-s-Linux-3D-Guest-Driver-Is-Ready and look for the replies of allquixotic (me), RealNC, and russofris.
Basically I think the consensus right now is this:
1. Doesn't matter if you're using Workstation or Player, as long as it's the latest version
2. Doesn't matter if you're using Linux host or Windows host
3. Doesn't matter if you're using Linux guest or Windows guest
4. Doesn't matter how much RAM or how many CPUs you assign to the guest
5. Doesn't matter if 3d accel is enabled or disabled
6. Doesn't matter if the guest and host are using separate hard disks
7. Isn't specific to any certain hardware (problem reproduced with "Nehalem" Core i7 and "Sandy Bridge" 2500K processors)
The symptom is that the guest experiences "micro-freezes" (on the order of 5 to 50 milliseconds) each time the host does any disk I/O.
This is most noticeable if you are playing sound in the guest, but you can kind of notice it by reduced graphics performance too.
A great torture test that makes the problem obvious (but it occurs noticeably even without doing something this heavy):
1. Start playing music in the guest, using the virtual sound driver
2. Unpack the Linux kernel tarball from a .tar.bz2 on the host
3. Listen as the sound stutters horribly
I don't remember this happening with Workstation 7.
The symptom is noticeable even if you do a simple thing like copy a 4 KB text file from one directory to another on the host. You'll get a little "blip" in your audio stream on the guest.
It's not just the virtual audio, either: I tried attaching my USB headset directly to the guest, so the guest was directly accessing the physical hardware using VMware's USB Arbitration. Even doing this, the audio lag was unbearable with modest disk I/O on the host.
It's not just audio, either: if you move the mouse "smoothly" in the guest while doing heavy I/O on the host, you notice that the mouse cursor will skip.
With this many orthogonal factors, there has to be some root cause, but we're running out of possibilities. What is going on?
Please read the Phoronix thread linked for information about our hardware and configurations. There are three of us (who don't know eachother, aside from talking on the same forum) who have independently reproduced the same problem.
