Vmware Workstation On A Linux Host - VMware 4 User Manual

VMware Workstation 4 User's Manual
The grabbed: HIGH – ungrabbed: NORMAL setting is useful if you have many
background processes or applications and you do not care if they run with fairly low
relative priority while VMware Workstation is in the foreground. In return, you get a
very noticeable performance boost using a VMware Workstation virtual machine
while another virtual machine is running or while some other processor-intensive task
(a compile, for example) is running in the background.
The reverse is true of the grabbed: NORMAL – ungrabbed: LOW setting. If your host
machine feels too sluggish when a virtual machine is running in the background, you
can direct the virtual machine to drop its priority when it does not have control of the
mouse and keyboard. As with the high setting, this is a heavy-handed change of
priority, so the virtual machine and any background applications run much more
slowly.

VMware Workstation on a Linux Host

Note: The items in this section describe performance of VMware Workstation on a
Linux host. For tips on configuring VMware Workstation on a Windows host, see
VMware Workstation on a Windows Host on page 289.
Using Full Screen Mode
Full screen mode is faster than window mode. As a result, if you do not need to have
your virtual machine and your host sharing the screen, try switching to full screen
mode.
Note: The extreme case of this is VGA mode. VGA mode is any mode in which the
screen is in text mode (DOS, for example, or Linux virtual terminals), or 16-color 640 x
480 graphics mode (for example, the Windows 95 or Windows 98 clouds boot screen
or any guest operating system that is running without the SVGA driver provided by
VMware Tools).
On a Linux host, full screen VGA mode uses the underlying video card directly, so
graphics performance is quite close to that of the host. By contrast, window mode
VGA requires more computer resources to emulate than window mode SVGA. As a
result, if you need to run for an extended period of time in VGA mode (for example,
when you are installing an operating system using a graphical installer) you should
see a significant performance boost if you run in full screen mode.
System Timer
Certain guests (Windows 98, for example) expect a very high interrupt rate from their
system timers. VMware Workstation on a Linux host uses /dev/rtc, the real-time
clock device, to try to keep up. However, continually servicing /dev/rtc and using
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