Intel Haswell Linux Virtualization: KVM vs. Xen vs. VirtualBox

Overall, Xen and KVM virtualization worked out great on Fedora 19 in conjunction with the Intel Core i7 4770K CPU. The performance overhead of these virtualization methods were minimal on the Haswell processor. While Xen and KVM were running great on the new Intel CPU, Oracle's VirtualBox (the latest release, v4.2.16) was much slower than Xen and KVM. The benefit VirtualBox has though is means of guest 3D acceleration, which will be benchmarked again in a future Phoronix article. Also to be benchmarked soon on Phoronix will be the relative overhead of the different virtualization methods when comparing Haswell to previous generations of Intel processors as well as AMD's competition.