Performance overhead of KVM on Linux 3.9 on ARM Cortex-A15

A number of simple performance measurements on network, CPU and disk speed were done on a dual ARM Cortex- A15 machine running Linux inside a KVM virtual machine that uses virtio disk and networking. Unexpected behaviour was observed in the CPU and memory intensive benchmarks, and in the networking benchmarks. The average overhead of running inside KVM is between zero and 30 percent when the host is lightly loaded (running only the system software and the necessary qemu-system-arm virtualization code), but the relative overhead increases when both host and VM is busy. We conjecture that this is related to the scheduling inside the host Linux.hyper