VBox influences applications running on other CPUs

[Alexander Boettcher]

Hi,

On 12.11.2014 14:06, Christian Menard wrote:
> When I setup a system that starts the Android-VM and Nitpicker in parallel on 
> top of my Framebuffer-Multiplexer but does not start any nitpicker apps, 
> everything works fine in single- and multi-processor case. However, as soon as 
> I start a nitpicker app like liquid_fb, the system gets very slow while the 
> android kernel is booting. The kernel boot takes more than 30 minutes (usually 
> a few seconds) and everything else is very slow as well. In the case where 
> virtualbox runs on a separate CPU it gets even worse. Once the kernel boot 
> completed, the system runs fast again. In this state starting virtualbox on 
> another CPU helps, the system in general responds faster and has better 
> performance.

Do you see during the slow down messages like "apply timer quirk" in the
log output ?

Alex.
> 
> I wonder why an app running in parallel to virtualbox influences the 
> performance of the whole system so drastically. First I thought it might be 
> related to my Framebuffer multiplexer, but the problem remains when starting 
> virtualbox in a liquid_fb. Do you have any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks
> Christian
> 
> On Monday 10 November 2014 11:26:44 Alexander Boettcher wrote:
>> Hello Christian,
>>
>> On 09.11.2014 14:51, Alexander Boettcher wrote:
>>> The core services and init are running on the boot CPU. By moving all
>>> critical servers to another CPU (as done in your run script) you get a
>>> lot of cross CPU switching overhead, whenever the services call init or
>>> core.
>>>
>>> The better approach is to start VBox on another CPU instead, actually I
>>> doesn't know whether this is already works ...
>>
>> please try following attached patch. With it VBox can be started also on
>> another CPU then the boot CPU.
>>
>> Does it work for you ?
>>
>> Alex.
> 
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