Recently I've been playing around with qemu, kvm and VFIO on an Arch Linux machine. My goal is to jump on the train of people using Linux host machines and creating a Windows 10 Pro guest VM to game on.
PCI passthrough is working great, and the benchmarks for my GPU on the guest machine are right inline with other published results. The problem I'm running into is with CPU performance.
My setup has a Intel i7 6800k. On the host machine, GeekBench gave me a result of 4129 (single core) and 15669 (multi-core). With the following QEMU script, I'm unable to get a CPU score of above 6260 with any modification I make to the smp parameter. This includes...
- -smp 2
- -smp 4
- -smp 8
- -smp cores=2,sockets=2
- -smp cores=4,sockets=2 (2758, 5210)
- -smp cores=8,sockets=2 (2776, 5230)
- -smp cores=2,sockets=4 (2830, 5232)
- -smp cores=2,sockets=8 (2824, 5175)
- -smp cores=3,sockets=2,threads=2
Throughout the entire test, I could never get the Windows VM to register more than 2 Sockets and 2 Virtual Processors. I'm guessing this has something to do with the fact the Windows OS knows it's a VM since there's no mention of cores or logical processors.
Anyone know of any configuration settings I'm missing to get windows to register the additional cores I'm specifying and help improve my VMs CPU performance?
Oh, and here's a list of the current modules I have installed and configured on the host machine.
Thanks!