Linux question

[scole of TSBT]

How much performance/credit difference is there between running Linux under VBox vs. booting Linux from a USB stick?

[Bryan]

It seems to be machine/processor dependent. On my I7-3930s I get about a 12% boost. On the Dell T5500s (dual Xeon 5675s) I see 25% and that makes a huge difference. Sphynx also has some T5500s and he saw the same level of improvement. So there is no one answer that covers it.

There is very little difference between running native Linux on the HDD and running it on a USB stick.

[Bryan]

After thinking about it a little more the answer might be what I see on the I7 rigs ... 12.6%. Mumps and I were talking a while back and he said he had noticed on one of his dual AMD processor machines that native Linux did MUCH better than VBox. So that probably indicates that VBox doesn't handle dual processor as well as it could.

[trigggl]

It probably depends on if you're using USB-3. With USB-2, anything that writes to memory a lot will slow things down. I seem to recall that being my experience with running linux off of a USB stick (since I don't have USB-3).

[scole of TSBT]

If a system only has USB 2.0 ports, is there any performance advantage using a USB 3.0 stick? I understand the USB bus only runs a 2.0 speed, but do the newer USB 3.0 sticks operate faster internally? Or is the USB 2.0 bus speed going to be the bottleneck?

Or have you guys worked out a way to control duel boot on a headless system and choose which OS to default load? Which makes booting from a USB drive unnecessary, doesn't it?

[Bryan]

I've run 3 of my machines off of USB 2.0 sticks in 2.0 slots (dual Xeons rigs that don't support 3.0) and there is very little difference in performance to running off the internal HDD. You might get a small boost off of using 3.0 sticks but if 2.0 is close to HDD capability then it won't be much.

All the articles I found on running remote dual boot used methods I'm not willing to screw with remotely where I have no access to the machines for months. When I head south in another 5 weeks I will have the machines with programmable power strips and powered USB hubs. If I want to switch to Linux I will turn on the USB hub (with Linux stick) using the programmable power strip and then reboot the machine. If I want to run Windows I will turn off the hub and reboot and the machine will go into its default Windows OS.

If someone has a better way of doing it, I certainly be interested in hearing about it also :D