Re: [Xen-users] Purpose of mem-max command

[Marco Guazzone <marco.guazzone@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, 2015-10-11 at 19:47 +0100, Simon Hobson wrote:
>> Bear in mind that I'm not even an advanced user ...
>>
>>
>> On 11 Oct 2015, at 11:45, Marco Guazzone <marco.guazzone@xxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > What I don't understand is how to use it effectively.
>> > Could you provide a practical example of how to use it?
>>
>> I don't know if it works on an already running VM
>
> You would need a kernel which supports memory hotplug and not just
> ballooning. Support for memory hotplug is quite new in Xenified mainline
> Linux, I'm not sure when it was added. Hopefully the keywords will be
> sufficient for some search engine.
> [...]
>
>> AIUI, when a machine (whether virtual or bare metal) starts up, certain
>> memory structures (kernal tables) are setup based on the amount of memory
>> installed.
>
> Correct.
>
>>  I assume that this constrains the machine from dynamically adding memory
>> above what was present at startup - or in this context, configured by the
>> maxmem argument to Xen.
>
> Mostly correct, it's this "dynamically adding memory" (or more accurately
> "banks of memory") which then requires hotplug and not just regular
> ballooning.
>
> (You can, sort of, think of memory hotplug as being coarse grained and
> ballooning more granular, kind of).
>
>
> Ian.

Dear all,

Thank you for your replies.

Your suggestions are clear to me, but I still don't understand the
purpose "xl mem-max" command. :-)

Also , maybe I misunderstood the memory ballooning and the
poplutae-on-demand techniques.

From this article,
   
https://blog.xenproject.org/2014/02/14/ballooning-rebooting-and-the-feature-youve-never-heard-of/
it seems that the guest OS should think to have the maximum amount of
RAM configured with "maxmen":

Instead, from experiments (including the ones you suggested), the
amount of memory the guest OS sees is the one configured with "memory"
(in the configuration file) or set with "xl mem-set".
For instance, in the Simon's example, the guest OS sees 512MB and not 2GB.
Similarly, in the Adam's example, the guest OS sees 8GB (or 10GB,
after "xl mem-set 10g") and not 20GB.
In both cases, if I attempt to allocate (e.g., with calloc) an amount
of memory greater than the one specified by "memory" config parameter
or set with "xl mem-set" but less than specified by "maxmem" config
parameter, the allocation fails (e.g., either calloc returns NULL or
the process is killed).
For instance, in the Adam's example, if I calloc 12GB of RAM, the
process is killed.

It is as if "memory" and "xl mem-set" concerned only memory hot-plugging...

Is there a way in Xen to control/emulate on-demand memory provisioning
like populate-on-demand does without doing memory hot-plug (i.e.,
guest thinks to have X GB of RAM, but only Y < X GB of RAM is
assigned)?


Cheers,

Marco

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