RE: [Xen-devel] what happens when a PoD page is touched?

["James Harper" <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> At 11:16 +0100 on 15 May (1305458171), James Harper wrote:
> > I'm finding that the time of boot and hibernation of Windows under
> > xen-4.0.2-rc3 when maxmem is set is a big problem - 40 seconds to
> > balloon down 512MB on my system. Hibernation is even worse with
delays
> > of minutes or hours.
> >
> > What happens when such a PoD page is touched? Does Xen or qemu
handle
> > this?
> 
> Xen handles it.  When you touch a PoD page the frame is backed with a
> fresh, zeroed page from the pool of PoD pages.  The slowdown comes
when
> the PoD pages run low; then Xen has to scan guest memory looking for
> pages that are all zeroes and reclaim them into the PoD pool.
> 
> This is all pretty unpleasant, as you can imagine.  The practical
> advice is:
> 
> - get your balloon driver loaded as soon as you possibly can,
>   so you can balloon down before the Windows page scrubber pointlessly
>   touches all of RAM (AIUI on SMP systems this is pretty hard; it may
be
>   that once we get UEFI firmware it will be eaiser);

Doing that pretty successfully. The only slowdown is when I balloon down
and have to zero the pages first (see below)

> - alloc pages to be ballooned using an interface that doesn't scrub
them;

That exists under Windows 2003 and newer (MmAllocatePagesForMdlEx with
the MM_DONT_ZERO_ALLOCATION flag), but not before that. But I thought
the pages had to be zeroed by us anyway as part of the contract? I tried
testing each page before freeing and the first 90% or so are already all
zeroes but the last few % of pages aren't necessarily.

> - don't be too aggressive about how much you overcommit.

:)

> Ideally, once Hyper-V brings in an interface for dynamic memory
> ballooning in guests, we can use that and avoid this whole rigmarole
for
> new windows version.
> 
> CC'ing George, who knows this code best.  IIRC there were some tweaks
to
> this code for XenServer, which I hope are all now upstream.  Do you
know
> whether 4.1-testing has the full set or are they only in -unstable?
> 

Is the delay only the first time a page is touched? If I allocate 1MB
worth of pages (I'm ballooning up/down in 1MB increments) and Windows
goes through and zero's the lot, will the sweep be invoked every time a
new page is hit (potentially just reusing one of the previously zeroed
pages)?

Thanks

James


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