Re: 2.4.18-pre7 slow ... apm problem

Thomas Hood (jdthood@mail.com)
Mon, 28 Jan 2002 11:19:58 -0500

On Mon, 2002-01-28 at 08:18, Alan Cox wrote:
> We don't know how VMware switches between virtual machines. If that
> switch is done behind Linux back, then VMware is effectively special.
> It is virtualising the system and it has to virtualise APM status too.
> If its doing the switch when it is a current foreground process then
> it wouldnt explain the problem

VMware is essentially a hardware emulator, so if the guest OS is
idling the CPU it should only be idling the virtual CPU, not the
real one.

Having said that, VMware emulates a lot of hardware by making
use of facilities that Linux provides. It emulates a super-VGA
card by making use of X, for example. Do you suppose that
VMware emulates CPU slowing by slowing the real CPU? I hope not.

Since VMware is closed source software we needn't worry our
heads too much about this problem. VMware users have a
workaround: set idle_threshold to 100.

Can we get more info about the keyboard repeat rate slowing?

--
Thomas


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