I usually dual-boot a few Linux distro's to try them out, and I was thinking of using Xen instead to make them easier to manage or run multiple OS's at once.

I was just wondering what the performance would be like, as with dual-booting you get the full speed of the system.

My CPU is an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67Ghz) with 1GB memory.

Please share you views. Thanks.

From what I have read, I gather that Xen is the fastest of the virtual machine setups---The catch being that the Kernel has to be compiled for Xen. This said, ANY virtual machine will be slower than the "direct" approach---the processor simply has more work to do.

Whether you will notice the difference depends on whether the application is CPU-intensive or I/O intensive. For example, I would expect no noticeable difference in web browsing.

What would a Google search show---eg using "virtual machine speed"?

I've already tried google, but no real definite answer. I just wanted to hear from the horses mouth so to speak.

I also forgot to mention in my first post was that I was mainly concerned about X GUI performance.

I am going to try it anyway, but I was just curious of people's experiences.

I don't qualify as a horse---more like a colt with 4 left feet...
Good decision to go ahead and try it....

Hi people it's my first time here, I'm sorry if this is the wrong thread. Can anyone please help me with information regarding the xen installation procedure. When I try to compile xen from source I get an error:

/home/radii/xen-3.1.0-src/linux-2.6.14.3-xen/arch/i386/Makefile:38: /home/radii/xen-3.1.0-src/linux-2.6.14.3-xen/arch/i386/Makefile.cpu: No such file or directory
make[5]: *** No rule to make target `/home/radii/xen-3.1.0-src/linux-2.6.14.3-xen/arch/i386/Makefile.cpu'. Stop.
make[4]: *** [oldconfig] Error 2
make[4]: Leaving directory `/home/radii/xen-3.1.0-src/linux-2.6.14.3-xen'
make[3]: *** [build-linux-2.6.14.3-xen_x86_32/include/linux/autoconf.h] Error 2
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/radii/xen-3.1.0-src'
make[2]: *** [linux-2.6-xen-install] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/radii/xen-3.1.0-src'
make[1]: *** [install-kernels] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/radii/xen-3.1.0-src'
make: *** [world] Error 2

I use the command make world as described in the user guide.

Just a follow up if anyone is interested, I have installed Xen on a fresh install of Fedora 7 as the host and also as a guest.

It works really well, however, performance wise, in a console with no X running it is lightning fast (I suppose it would be :-) ) and using it as a server is good aswell, but using it with X and Gnome running, it is a bit too slow to be usable compared to dual-boot, for me anyway.

I am sure all this will improve in the future though, because I know they are working on GPU acceleration in VM's and the framebuffer driver that ships with Xen is much better than VMware used to be.