WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-devel

[Xen-devel] Memory overcommit

To: xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Xen-devel] Memory overcommit
From: Tracy R Reed <treed@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 14:00:10 -0800
Delivery-date: Sun, 11 Dec 2005 01:28:06 +0000
Envelope-to: www-data@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
List-help: <mailto:xen-devel-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=help>
List-id: Xen developer discussion <xen-devel.lists.xensource.com>
List-post: <mailto:xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
List-subscribe: <http://lists.xensource.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel>, <mailto:xen-devel-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=subscribe>
List-unsubscribe: <http://lists.xensource.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel>, <mailto:xen-devel-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=unsubscribe>
Organization: Copilot Consulting
Sender: xen-devel-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050929 Thunderbird/1.0.7 Fedora/1.0.7-1.1.fc4 Mnenhy/0.7.2.0
I have been using Xen on a daily basis on a production (but not
critical) machine for a number of months now. It's looking really good.

One thing that I have not yet seen anyone mention as a feature that I
would really like to see is the ability to overcommit memory. I have 2G
of RAM in my machine. I would like to give a developer his own virtual
domain to sandbox his application development without having to dedicate
a whole piece of hardware to just him. But I know he won't really log in
and use it all that often. If I give him 512M of my 2G that's 25% of my
memory that will likely be unutilized most of the time. It would be
great if I could assign more memory to domains than I actually have and
just let it swap out idle pages. I bet there are a lot of boxes out
there, especially in webserver colo's, that really don't get much
traffic and really don't need as much RAM as they have in them for
normal day to day operations. Just let them swap everything back in and
use up to the maximum RAM configured for that domain if they get busy
and need it but let it swap out the rest of the time so other busier
domains can use the physical RAM.

This is feature #1 on my Xen wishlist. Is there any work going into this
area?

-- 
Tracy R Reed
http://copilotconsulting.com
1-877-MY-COPILOT

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>