I'm in no way a performance expert, so I can't comment on
most of the points you raise; hopefully someone with more
experience in the area will be able to help you.
That said...
On Mon, 2017-06-19 at 12:38 +0200, Dominik Psenner wrote:
Switching from IDE to virtio basically means that the host then
knows
that it runs on virtualized hardware and can do things differently? But
it also requires to modify the host with specialized drivers that even
influence the boot process. That feels more like a hack than a solution.
... I don't see why this would be a problem: installing
VirtIO drivers in a guest is not unlike installing drivers
that are tailored to the specific GPU in your laptop rather
than relying on the generic VGA drivers shipped with the OS.
Different hardware, different drivers.
Moreover, recent Windows versions ship Enlightened I/O
drivers which AFAIK do for guests running on Hyper-V pretty
much what VirtIO drivers do for those running on QEMU/KVM.
--
Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization