Re: [Xen-devel] RAM allocation and miscellaneous questions

[Ian Pratt <Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On September 29, 9:55 am Ian Pratt <Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >  It certainly does Mark (help, that is). I would like to learn more
> > >  about this balloon driver, which could make things very managable. Is
> > >  there any documentation or tutorial-like info about?
> >
> > The balloon driver hasn't been forward ported from 2.4 to 2.6 --
> > it's on the todo list (it'll probably work unmodified modulo
> > changes to the way proc fs works).
> >
> For people that still use linux 2.4 (like me) is there a tutorial or some
> documentation about the ballon driver ?

Mark is currently forward porting it to 2.6, and we're planing on
adding a couple of features to enable the memory footprint of a
domain to be controlled from xm/xend rather than just from just
within a domain.

> > If you've configured swap, domain 0 should be using just like any
> > normal linux kernel. The balloon driver works in dom0 just like
> > any other domain.
> It seems logical, but due to the fact that only a few process are running
> ind dom0, swap file don't need to be huge is it ?

Correct.
 
> When starting with xen one or two month ago, i've created a dom0 with only
> 32 Mo of ram, and when i launched xend, it was so slow that i tought i had
> a problem.
> I didn't take time to investigate and didn't remember how much memory was
> used and if the system was swaping or not.
> I just have done a test now with my current xen putting 32768 Mo on xen
> command line (not the kernel line in grub).
> And the system booted a bit slower and i suspect that durring the launch of
> xend it has done some swap.
> free return this just after the boot :
> mat@zeus:/$ free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:         32768      28572       4196          0          0       7172
> -/+ buffers/cache:      21400      11368
> Swap:       506008        312     505696


The resident working set of xend once it's started isn't too bad,
but all the library loading (particularly twisted) does lead to
quite a large virtual memory footprint. 

Perhaps one day, when xend has all the features we want, it'll be
time to re-write it in C, or OCAML...

Ian


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