A year ago I concluded that VirtualBox would be the best choice for desktop virtualization. I ran Windows 7 back then and wasn’t able to get MSYS2 terminal emulator displayed lively. And now I was to install Windows 10, so took a chance to reevaluate KVM in pursuit for better performance. This time I started with libvirt and virt-manager.

To my surprise, the installation went smoothly, and the performance was fantastic with all the virtio drivers. Even the terminal emulator msys2 drew TUI applications like midnight commander just fine. So it felt in all aspects like I was going to continue working with KVM until discovered that our SMPTE 2022-6 tests don’t quite work. They require transmission/reception of 200k datagrams per second (over localhost), but the system can’t keep up.

Amazingly, whenever I converted the images to VirtualBox (takes 5 minutes actually), the tests started to pass without any further change. So I will continue using it for another year.

Conclusions:

  • KVM became better and I could go with it in terms of GUI
  • VirtualBox is still the better choice for desktop virtualization
  • I improved performance by allocating space for disk C: on the SSD (64G should be enough)
  • Don’t trust what they say, try for your application by yourself.