There are two suggestions for improving performance on a Linux host operating system:
This topic also includes information about how to use more than 1GB of memory on a Linux host operating system.
Full screen mode is faster than window mode. Unfortunately, you can only run full screen mode in a local console. As a result, if there are no remote consoles connected to the virtual machine and you do not need to have your virtual machine and your host sharing the screen, try switching to full screen mode.
The extreme case of this is VGA mode. VGA mode is any mode where the screen is in text mode (such as with DOS or Linux virtual terminals), or 16-color, 640x480 graphics mode (such as with the Windows 9x 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 effectively very close to that of the host. By contrast, window mode VGA is more expensive 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, if you are installing an operating system using a graphical installer) you should see a very significant performance boost if you run in full screen mode.
Certain guests (such as Windows 98) expect a very high interrupt rate from their system timers. VMware GSX Server on a Linux host operating system uses /dev/rtc, the real-time clock device, to try to keep up. However, continually servicing /dev/rtc and using it to maintain a high interrupt rate increases the load on the host, even when the virtual machine does not appear to be busy.
To try running without /dev/rtc, disconnect it using the Devices menu. This may not make a critical difference in performance, but it can help reduce the load on the host.
By default, Linux kernels in the 2.2.x series support 1GB of physical memory. If you want to use more memory in Linux, you can take one of several approaches.
The CONFIG_2GB option calls for recompiling your kernel as a 2GB kernel. You do this by recompiling your kernel with CONFIG_2GB enabled. This allows Linux to support nearly 2GB of physical memory by dividing the address space into a 2GB user chunk and 2GB kernel chunk (as opposed to the normal 3GB User, 1GB kernel).
The third approach uses the CONFIG_BIGMEM option in Linux. With the CONFIG_BIGMEM option enabled, the kernel does not directly address all of physical memory and it can then map 1GB (or 2GB) of physical memory into the address space at a time. This allows the use of all of physical memory at the cost of changing the semantics the kernel uses to map virtual to physical addresses. However, VMware products expect physical memory to be mapped directly in the kernel's address space and thus do not work properly with the CONFIG_BIGMEM option enabled.
If you are using a 1GB kernel with CONFIG_BIGMEM enabled and have 960MB to 1983MB of memory, VMware GSX Server cannot run. To work around this issue, you can either:
If you have a 1GB kernel with CONFIG_BIGMEM enabled and have more than 1983MB of memory, you can do one of the following:
If you are using a 2GB kernel with CONFIG_BIGMEM enabled and have 1984MB or more memory, VMware GSX Server cannot run. You can either pass the boot-time switch mem=1983M at the LILO prompt or add it to lilo.conf to disable CONFIG_BIGMEM and thus allow you to run VMware GSX Server. To use the switch:
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