UTM is slower than multipass on Apple M1

[samchang8826]

Describe the issue
UTM is slower than multipass on Apple M1

Configuration

• UTM Version: Version 4.0.9 (68)
• macOS Version: 13
• Mac Chip (Intel, M1, ...): Apple M1 Max

Debug log

sysbench --test=cpu run

multipass:

UTM

[osy]

I’m not sure what the issue is. Benchmarks will always be slower in a VM than on native because of overheads.

[samchang8826]

FYI

$ps aux | grep multipass

/Library/Application Support/com.canonical.multipass/bin/qemu-system-aarch64 -machine virt,highmem=off -accel hvf -drive file=/Library/Application Support/com.canonical.multipass/bin/../Resources/qemu/edk2-aarch64-code.fd,if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on -cpu cortex-a72 -nic vmnet-shared,model=virtio-net-pci,mac=52:54:00:0d:3d:51 -device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi0 -drive file=/var/root/Library/Application Support/multipassd/qemu/vault/instances/xxxx/ubuntu-20.04-server-cloudimg-arm64.img,if=none,format=qcow2,discard=unmap,id=hda -device scsi-hd,drive=hda,bus=scsi0.0 -smp 8 -m 8192M -qmp stdio -chardev null,id=char0 -serial chardev:char0 -nographic -cdrom /var/root/Library/Application Support/multipassd/qemu/vault/instances/xxxx/cloud-init-config.iso -loadvm suspend -machine virt-6.2

[osy]

Did you set your VM also to 8 cores and 8GB ram?

[samchang8826]

yes, i have also tried to set cpu as cortex-a72, the result does not change

[samchang8826]

I was wondering if you could reproduce this issue by installing multipass on your local machine ...

multipass is a tool provided by Ubuntu (Canonical Ltd.)

[osy]

@samchang8826 I just ran it with my M1 MacBook Air (set to 4G RAM, 4 cores) and got the opposite result. Using sysbench --test=cpu run I got 86203 number of events on multipass and 109167 on UTM.

Also, the benchmark seems to be single threaded so CPU count shouldn't matter. Not sure if that's intentional. I think what may be happening is that macOS is deciding to schedule the benchmark on an E-core randomly.