Re: [Xen-devel] Trouble with Xen 2.0

[Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> I tested Xen 2.0 and basic behaviour looks solid and stable, but 
> "dynamic" features didn't work at all for me. More specifically ; with 
> the precompiled build :
> 
> - saving a domain on a P4 computer was erratic (the save process was 
> hung ; dom0 and the to-be-saved VM were still running fine) ; it worked 
> "sometimes" (with no apparent influence of memory load, cpu load, etc). 
> The logs showed the line indicating a save, but nothing more (nothing 
> more than when the save succeeds)

I tested save/restore a little myself recently and couldn't get it to
crash. But various people have seen the crash in time_resume(). Maybe
if I could have a crash dump + vmlinux image file I might be able to
work out what's going on. It'd be even better if I could reproduce the
problem though.

> - using the balloon interface to reduce the memory worked, but reducing 
> it by a large increment caused the affected VM to crash, spitting 
> repeatedly the same message over the console (I didn't have means to 
> save those messages yet, sorry, but I'll try to get them asap)

The balloon driver needs some cleaning and better integration with all
the places in the kernel that increase/decrease the domain's memory
reservation. 

> - OTOH, we could migrate a linux VM from a P4 machine to a Celeron one, 
> and it kept working for a while (but /proc/cpuinfo showed wrong flags, 
> so maybe some optimized code would have crashed)

That just sounds like a bad idea. Suspend/resume or migrating across
very different hardware configurations is asking for trouble. It's
intended for canning images or transferring workloads across a
homegeneous cluster. In particular, 'downgrading' to a lesser CPU is
asking for trouble -- e.g., software RAID trying to use non-existent
SSE instructions, to pull a random example out of the air.

 -- Keir


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