Installing Gentoo in VirtualBox...

[Scott Vargovich]

Hi,

My desktop machine has an Intel Pentium 4 processor and I'm installing Gentoo in VirtualBox on it.  Do I declare the processor to be Intel Pentium 4 as well?  I'm thinking so, but I just want to make sure I'm not making a flawed assumption.

Thanks,

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[Neil]

You have some flex, of course, but generally the closer you get to the metal, the better.

VB has options for changing the CPU, but it has to software-emulate anything it can't do natively; whereas something like 90% of native stuff can be handed directly to the CPU. The less overhead you have, the smoother everything runs.

To make up an example; if you set it up as a new high-end 128-bit processor, and say 50% of the cpu functions had to be emulated; then you install Linux on it, which detects the newer cpu, and configures itself to use as much of the cpu as it can. At that point, you're really hammering the software emulation.

If you set it to Pentium 4, and Linux sets itself up to run as fast as it can on that CPU, then a larger share of what the OS does can be done on he hardware, without overhead.