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Comment by itry | Hacker News Reader

Do I understand this correctly? Windows in Quemu will feel as fast as installed directly?

If thats the case, I would buy a windows 8 CD just to play around with it without having to leave Debian. Will Windows 8 run in Qemu?

Does this latest Qemu run under Debian 6?

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No, "experimental threaded backend for virtio-blk-pci achieving up to a 900% increase in IOP rate on very large storage devices" does not translate to "Windows in Quemu will feel as fast as installed directly".

There is no need to buy Windows 8, just download the free trial. It runs without problems under qemu. See also: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Guest_Support_Status#Windows_F...

The GPU is still emulated in software, so it's likely to be quite slow.

Probably it's true that it will run as fast as 95% of native speed. However, you still have a host OS running in parallel... so it won't be the same as running either as full native I guess.

Or, you can just use VirtualBox to test it? I don't know if they already support it.

They support Windows 8.

This isn't just the fact as of this release. Xen is based on Qemu which can run e.g. Win7 paravirtualized on the same machine obtaining complete gfx or othe pci(-e) devices and run almost full speed. I am curious about the impact now that it is even faster.

Is that really paravirtualization? How does Xen run a binary OS as paravirtualized?

I think you're right and the guy you replied to misspoke. Xen running Windows is called HVM which seems to be distinct from paravirtualization.

How does, say, Photoshop perform?

Xen is not based on QEMU. Xen can use QEMU for emulating some devices when doing full virtualization, but when doing paravirtualization (most useful case) it doesn't use QEMU at all.

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