Xhyve hypervisor, a port of bhyve to OS X
github.com
github.com
I only need a very lightweight (command line) VM, but it needs to be as performant as possible. It'd be nice to use something like Xhyve rather than buying a Fusion license.
Recompiling FreeBSD 10-STABLE (make clean buildworld installworld buildkernel installkernel) in xhyve took 32 minutes on my 3.4 GHz quad-core i5.
Since BSD is heavy on sandbox models I'm assuming that will also be true here and they're not implementing a para-virtualized architecture. That being said, the host kernel will have to wait for NOOP on X amount of cores in order to permit the VM to run. You may also gain performance by disabling hyperthreading. With HT your cores share resources for each thread. This is great for small time stuff that may only ever need a fraction of time on the bus or make only a couple of changes to the cache. But compute heavy actions should have full access.
Just a quad-core i7. I offload anything that requires major processing power to a cluster, but sometimes I just want to test things locally first and that involves running heavily-parallelised software on Linux. I just don't even know what order of magnitudes to expect with a VM like this; running at 0.8x speed would be fine, running at 0.1x wouldn't. I'll just have to benchmark it myself when I get the chance.