Re: [Xen-devel] xen-2.0 20040910 problems

[Peri Hankey <mpah@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ian Pratt wrote:

> > I have been experimenting with xen 2.0 and before that with xeno-unstable. It
> > has proved interesting and promising
> >
> > However, the last few updates have been problematic. In particular it looks as
> > if the ext3 filesystem is not correctly handled.
> >    
> Can you give us an idea when it last worked reliably for you?
>
>  
The previous snapshot - 20040906 - worked ok but encountered "Kernel 
panic: Unable to reduce memory reservation ..." as discussed elsewhere 
in this list.
> > Recent history:
> >
> >    20040907:  occasional kernel BUGs
> >    20040908:  instant reboot loop when booting xen
> >    20040909:  mysterious filesystem problems
> >    20040910:  mysterious filesystem problems
> >    
> I suspect that these are all a result of experiencing some
> virtual memory bug.
>  
At present the snapshot for 20040911 seems to show no signs of the 
filesystem problem, so I probably was seeing a side effect of some of 
the changes you were making in the pagetable system.
However I have seen at least one instance of the "Kernel panic: Unable 
to reduce memory reservation ..." problem.
> It's pretty odd, as we haven't seen any problems in our testing,
> but its possible that our automated testing doesn't run enough
> concurrent domains to tweak it.
>
> Can you tell us a bit more about your setup, e.g. SMP? Xeon or
> Opteron? 
>
>  
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2400+ stepping 01 ('uname -a' shows architecture 
as i686).  512Mbytes RAM. El-cheapo-self-build(tm). The Xen kernels are 
built straight out of the snapshot with no local configuration.
> What are the other domains doing when 'rpm -qa' explodes?
>  
Nothing much (no exerciser running). But running sshd, postfix, apache, 
proftpd,  webmin, xinetd.
Each xenU domain has only 32Mbytes, so the virtual memory would have 
been fairly active. Each domain would like to have a swap partition but 
doesn't get one as yet largely because I haven't got round to changing 
the configuration from the minimum required to make untrusted domains 
boot and run. But I'm not clear how swap and xen are intended to 
interact, and whether I should configure swap devices for untrusted domains.
> What version of libc are you using i.e. 'ldd /bin/rpm' ? (We've
> never used mandrake, but I doubt this is significant)
>  
....$ ldd `which rpm`
       linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xfbffd000)
       librpm-4.2.so => /usr/lib/librpm-4.2.so (0x40029000)
       librpmdb-4.2.so => /usr/lib/librpmdb-4.2.so (0x40082000)
       librpmio-4.2.so => /usr/lib/librpmio-4.2.so (0x4016d000)
       libpopt.so.0 => /lib/libpopt.so.0 (0x401af000)
       libelf.so.1 => /usr/lib/libelf.so.1 (0x401b7000)
       libbeecrypt.so.6 => /usr/lib/libbeecrypt.so.6 (0x401c9000)
       librt.so.1 => /lib/i686/librt.so.1 (0x401e7000)
       libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i686/libpthread.so.0 (0x401fa000)
       libbz2.so.1 => /usr/lib/libbz2.so.1 (0x4024c000)
       libc.so.6 => /lib/i686/libc.so.6 (0x4025b000)
       /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

I very much doubt if use of Mandrake has much to do with it. My main 
issue with Mandrake is that the standard boot files need quite a lot of 
tweaking if you want to have an nfs root. But this also applies to some 
other distributions I've tried.
> If you can narrow down to a simple to reproduce test case I'm
> surewe can find and fix this.
>  
It currently looks to have been a passing glitch.

>  
>
> > On a different topic, I have never yet seen the web interface work for long
> > enough to be useful - it always crashes with the int-text type clash that was
> > mentioned somewhere in the changelogs as having been fixed.
> >    
> The web interface is very much a work-in-progress that we're
> hoping other people will contribute on. 
>  
I realised that, but hadn't yet made very serious attempts to find my 
way into the guts of the python.
Thanks
Peri



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