[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 4/4] hvmloader: add support to load extra ACPI tables from qemu
On 26/01/16 13:44, Jan Beulich wrote: >>>> On 26.01.16 at 12:44, <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 2:52 PM, Jan Beulich <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>>>> On 21.01.16 at 15:01, <haozhong.zhang@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>> On 01/21/16 03:25, Jan Beulich wrote: >>>>>>>> On 21.01.16 at 10:10, <guangrong.xiao@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>>>> c) hypervisor should mange PMEM resource pool and partition it to >>>>>> multiple >>>>>> VMs. >>>>> >>>>> Yes. >>>>> >>>> >>>> But I Still do not quite understand this part: why must pmem resource >>>> management and partition be done in hypervisor? >>> >>> Because that's where memory management belongs. And PMEM, >>> other than PBLK, is just another form of RAM. >> >> I haven't looked more deeply into the details of this, but this >> argument doesn't seem right to me. >> >> Normal RAM in Xen is what might be called "fungible" -- at boot, all >> RAM is zeroed, and it basically doesn't matter at all what RAM is >> given to what guest. (There are restrictions of course: lowmem for >> DMA, contiguous superpages, &c; but within those groups, it doesn't >> matter *which* bit of lowmem you get, as long as you get enough to do >> your job.) If you reboot your guest or hand RAM back to the >> hypervisor, you assume that everything in it will disappear. When you >> ask for RAM, you can request some parameters that it will have >> (lowmem, on a specific node, &c), but you can't request a specific >> page that you had before. >> >> This is not the case for PMEM. The whole point of PMEM (correct me if >> I'm wrong) is to be used for long-term storage that survives over >> reboot. It matters very much that a guest be given the same PRAM >> after the host is rebooted that it was given before. It doesn't make >> any sense to manage it the way Xen currently manages RAM (i.e., that >> you request a page and get whatever Xen happens to give you). > > Interesting. This isn't the usage model I have been thinking about > so far. Having just gone back to the original 0/4 mail, I'm afraid > we're really left guessing, and you guessed differently than I did. > My understanding of the intentions of PMEM so far was that this > is a high-capacity, slower than DRAM but much faster than e.g. > swapping to disk alternative to normal RAM. I.e. the persistent > aspect of it wouldn't matter at all in this case (other than for PBLK, > obviously). > > However, thinking through your usage model I have problems > seeing it work in a reasonable way even with virtualization left > aside: To my knowledge there's no established protocol on how > multiple parties (different versions of the same OS, or even > completely different OSes) would arbitrate using such memory > ranges. And even for a single OS it is, other than for disks (and > hence PBLK), not immediately clear how it would communicate > from one boot to another what information got stored where, > or how it would react to some or all of this storage having > disappeared (just like a disk which got removed, which - unless > it held the boot partition - would normally have pretty little > effect on the OS coming back up). Last year at Linux Plumbers Conference I attended a session dedicated to NVDIMM support. I asked the very same question and the INTEL guy there told me there is indeed something like a partition table meant to describe the layout of the memory areas and their contents. It would be nice to have a pointer to such information. Without anything like this it might be rather difficult to find the best solution how to implement NVDIMM support in Xen or any other product. Juergen _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel
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