The pursuit for the fastest virtual machine

[distro]

I recently embarked on a mission to set up the fastest virtual machine possible (OS X Mavericks running on Windows 8.1). I think I'm almost there.

 

Note: This is not at all about hardware. My mission is simply to remove all bottlenecks.

 

Background

 

I wanted a Hackintosh. But I have a Dell Latitude E4310 with a BCM4313, a WiFi card which is not compatible with OS X, so I set out to run the OS in a virtual machine

 

Software

I'm using VMware Workstation 10, though Player 6 will probably also work, running on Windows 8.1 x64

 

Hardware

Dell Latitude E4310, with Intel i5 processor and Intel HD Graphics (1st generation). 4GB RAM. 150GB WD Scorpio Black 7200RPM.

 

Initial bottlenecks & issues

• Disk
• Graphics
• Network
• RAM

Bottlenecks removed

• Disk
• Network

Bottlenecks almost removed

• Graphics
• RAM

 

Process

 

Hardware & host

First off, disk. Using a virtual disk was probably the largest bottleneck in the initial setup, so I knew I had to find another way. After some searching, this has been completely solved. Here's how.

 

1. Create a partition on the hard drive. Mine is 38GB.
2. Add this physical partition to the VM
3. Edit the VMDK file. Remove all extent descriptions except the correct partition. Remove all of the UUID stuff. At the top, change createType to "fullDevice".
   
   Here's my VMDK file:
   

   # Disk DescriptorFile
   version=1
   encoding="windows-1252"
   CID=4752fba3
   parentCID=ffffffff
   isNativeSnapshot="no"
   createType="fullDevice"
   
   # Extent description
   RW 79687680 FLAT "\\.\PhysicalDrive0" 211916800
   
   # The Disk Data Base 
   #DDB
   
   ddb.adapterType = "ide"
   ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "1024"
   ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "255"
   ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "63"
   ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16383"
   ddb.geometry.heads = "16"
   ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
   ddb.longContentID = "00ccb28b97ee4e6bd3d16fec4752fba3"
   ddb.toolsVersion = "9409"
   ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 93 91 9e 74 ec-87 2e a4 eb c3 51 f9 db"
   ddb.virtualHWVersion = "10"

Network was easier. I use NAT since Bridged didn't always work for me. There shouldn't be any issues here.

 

RAM shouldn't be too much of an issue. Just don't run anything other than VMware. I run my VM with 2.5GB, and it seems to work okay (I can run Chrome with a few tabs while running Activity Monitor, iTerm2, and Sublime Text).

 

Software & Guest

Time for graphics. Install the latest VMware tools and the awesome VMsvga2 driver (http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsvga2/). Big thanks to Zenith432 for that! Set the vram size to 128MB.

 

However, VMware imposes a 128MB limit for vram. I'm trying to find a way around this. Zenith says that VMsvga allocates more video memory when needed, but OS X doesn't recognize this. Graphics performance is still a bit laggy.

 

 

This is meant to be a discussion thread. Post your suggestions!

 

Cheers,

Alfred