[GTALUG] Re: QEMU vs VirtualBox -- which is faster?

On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 12:53:10PM -0400, William Park via Talk wrote:

I'm running Kubuntu 26.04 inside QEMU and VirtualBox.  Now, QEMU (with KVM enabled, --enable-kvm) is supposedly be faster, but strangely it seems slower to me.  I am compiling kernel now, but that takes 2 hours on 2 cpu, which mean I have to wait 4 hours to find out.

Is there a quick way to test cpu/ram/disk, by "quick", I mean 5min max?

As for performance, it also depends how much ram you gave the VM, the disk interface type, the backing store used for the disk, how many cpu cores, etc. Certainly I have seen many places claim qemu tends to win by 15 to 30% over virtualbox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0uaszySbfc for example -- Len Sorensen