Re: speed of qemu vms

[Leo Famulari]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 09:30:06PM +0200, Hartmut Goebel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> for testing I used to build VM using "guix system vm …" and the machines
> are, well, reacting slowly:
> 
> Plasma start up: 80 sec.
> 
> Menu: 36 sec
> 
> When I tried a Vm created with "guix system vm-image …" the machine is
> much quicker:
> 
> Plasma start up:  25 sec.
> 
> Menu: immediately.
> 
> This is a huge contrast, so I wonder what is the reason for this. Any
> ideas? And any ideas how to speed up the first variant?

The two methods are pretty different "under the hood".

`guix system vm` shares the store with the host machine using virtio. By
default, only 256 MB of RAM is allocated for the system. I recommend
inspecting the script that is created by `guix system vm` to see what it
does.

`guix system vm-image`, on the other hand, is a full virtual machine
image, with its own store.

It's hard to give specific feedback without more information about the
host machine(s) and other details of the environment.

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