Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 3 of 7] xenpaging: remove srand call

[Olaf Hering <olaf@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 31, Patrick Colp wrote:

> Yeah, I saw that. Is it actually possible to run out of pages to
> nominate? I would think the only way this would happen is if you
> specified that 100% of the guest memory is paged out. If it is
> possible, then would it maybe be better to add a check to the random
> policy to detect when it's tried all the pages? Of course, if linear
> performs just as well (or poorly) as random, then there's no point
> changing it from what it is now.

There is a wrap check in policy_choose_victim(). If 100% pages should be
swapped, nominate fails for a few and 100% cant be reached. I think
thats not easy to detect from within policy_choose_victim().
I havent done any performance analysis in the policy, nor in gneral.
The performance with a linear approach is eventually better because the
loop does need to wait for a random gfn number thats still free.  The
bottleneck is likely the IO and the stopped vcpus, not testing an array
of bits.

Olaf

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