Many of us have the cool Nokia N810 that is an ARM system based on maemo. To compile software for it, you will normally use scratchbox. What a pitty scratchbox only runs on 32bit hardware. As a proud user of a 64bit desktop, I have to use a virtual machine for running scratchbox. Now the question is what is the better virtualization solution: VirtualBox or VMWare?
Time for a KDE Compilation benchmark. I compiled KDEPIM Revision 854206 once in a VirtualBox-virtual machine, once in a VMWare-virtual machine.
With VirtualBox, you can only use of of your CPU cores, with VMWare Server, you can use two.
Here is the result:
Compilation with make in VirtualBox: 1 hour 13 minutes
Compilation with make -j2 in VMWare Server: 38 minutes 32 seconds
So the winner is... VMWARE !
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scatchbox on 64bit openSuSE
Not sure what distro your using for a 64bit OS, but most have 32bit compatible libraries (sorry to state the obvious)
(I believe it can be hard to setup in gentoo according to a friend, I have never seriously used gentoo however)
In opensuse you can install scratchbox from either a 32bit konsole or by running linux32 ./some-script.sh to install and using linux32 ./login.sh to get into the environment.
It all seemed to work correctly and I actually compiled some small apps as well
Not compared it but I imagine using 32bit-compat libs might give better performance (feel free to correct my mistake)
I would like to see 64bit scratchbox but until then using the 32bit-compat libs work well (and they are required for various closed progs I am planning to eventually replace/remove)
SMP
Not surprising, considering VirtualBox doesn't do SMP for guests yet.
They're very probably working on that important feature, but it sounds like a hard one to implement and there's no ETA