Hello.
I've been using Xen with some virtual machines for at least 2 years
now. When we all gone to VT-X, the xen world was introduced to windows
and we all enjoyed that... until we realized we needed drivers for it
to work =) We need to thank to James Harper for his efforts in making
the GPL PV drivers, so thanks!
Since the beginning of the GPLPV drivers development i've been
gathering feedback from all the users in the mailing list and some
months ago i've finally installed PV drivers 0.9.11-pre18. But the
performance was the same as without them, slow and with kernel times
almost at 100%.
I've tried solving it but never got anywhere, but the drivers remained
installed.
Today I installed 0.9.12-pre13 to test the performance - again the
performance is very similar with or without the pv drivers (screenshot
of device manager: http://uplink.lvengine.com/device.jpg )
I've benchmarked the network with iperf between Xen virtual machines
(pv machines, not hvm) and I get 2.5gbps ~ 3.0gbps, but with windows I
get around 40mb/s. My kernel times are almost 100% all the time and
disk performance is relatively slow (benchmarked with some windows
app, hd_speed, got me around 11mb/s - not bad, but the kernel times
are always up there... see http://uplink.lvengine.com/disk.jpg for a
screenshot).
I use Xen 3.2.1, on a gentoo linux, so xen is compiled from source
(for gentoo people, I have ioemu and pygrub use flags). I'm using
kernel 2.6.21 - I think this patchset was made by Red Hat, and
recently gentoo masked this version (or the version was already
masked), but i needed to use the .21 kernel because .18 doesn't have
support for one of my nic's and for the sata driver I think.
My windows-server config is based on the default python script :
# -*- mode: python; -*-
import os, re
arch = os.uname()[4]
if re.search('64', arch):
arch_libdir = 'lib64'
else:
arch_libdir = 'lib'
kernel = "/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader"
builder='hvm'
memory = 1532
shadow_memory = 16
name = "windows"
vcpus=1
pae=0
acpi=1
apic=1
vif = [ 'bridge=eth0, mac=00:16:3e:00:00:10' ]
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/windows-server/winz,hda,w','phy:/dev/atf-vg/
phc,hdb,w' ]
on_poweroff = 'destroy'
on_reboot = 'restart'
on_crash = 'restart'
device_model = '/usr/' + arch_libdir + '/xen/bin/qemu-dm'
boot="dc"
sdl=0
vnc=1
vnclisten="0.0.0.0"
localtime=1
usb=1
usbdevice='host:04b9:0300'
keymap='pt'
I use LVM in all partitions.
I've tried using ioemu: in the "hda" device and it's the same. I've
removed the /gplpv entry from boot.ini as -pre13 doesn't need it
anymore.
I must be configuring something wrong, maybe it's the ACPI
Multiprocessor PC kernel? (I installed this system a long time ago,
before the PV drivers - changing the acpi setting now could be bad...
- but if it must, I can try changing it...)
Something odd is that cpu-z reports to me that the cpu has only
812mhz, but windows detects it's a 2.24ghz processor (single
processor, i know the drivers have problems with smp and I don't need
smp anyway)
I basically only run SQL server in this machine, and for a machine
with 1.5gb of memory it runs really slow :/
Can anyone help me ?
Thanks in advance,
Luís
_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
|
Home
