Re: Xen balloon driver discuss

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@eu.citrix.com>]

FYI, the balloon driver in 2.6.18 was meant to be working at some point. 
  The xen tree has some drivers which will compile for 2.6.18 externally 
and will run in HVM mode.  More modern kernels need Stefano's pv-on-hvm 
patch series to be able to access xenstore (which is a requisite for a 
working balloon driver).

  -George

On 28/11/10 02:36, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
> Am I understanding correctly that you are running each linux-2.6.18 as
> HVM (not PV)? I didn’t think that the linux-2.6.18 balloon driver worked
> at all in an HVM guest.
>
> You also didn’t say what version of Xen you are using. If you are
> running xen-unstable, you should also provide the changeset number.
>
> In any case, any load of HVM guests should never crash Xen itself, but
> if you are running HVM guests, I probably can’t help much as I almost
> never run HVM guests.
>
> *From:* cloudroot [mailto:cloudroot@sina.com]
> *Sent:* Friday, November 26, 2010 11:55 PM
> *To:* tinnycloud; Dan Magenheimer; xen devel
> *Cc:* george.dunlap@eu.citrix.com
> *Subject:* re: Xen balloon driver discuss
>
> Hi Dan:
>
> I have set the benchmark to test balloon driver, but unfortunately the
> Xen crashed on memory Panic.
>
> Before I attach the details output from serial port(which takes time on
> next run), I am afraid of I might miss something on test environment.
>
> My dom0 kernel is 2.6.31, pvops.
>
> Well currently there is no driver/xen/balloon.c on this kernel source
> tree, so I build the xen-balloon.ko, Xen-platform-pci.ko form
>
> linux-2.6.18.x86_64, and installed in Dom U, which is redhat 5.4.
>
> What I did is put a C program in the each Dom U(total 24 HVM), the
> program will allocate the memory and fill it with random string repeatly.
>
> And in dom0, a phthon monitor will collect the meminfo from xenstore and
> calculate the target to balloon from Committed_AS.
>
> The panic happens when the program is running in just one Dom.
>
> I am writing to ask whether my balloon driver is out of date, or where
> can I get the latest source code,
>
> I’ve googled a lot, but still have a lot of confusion on those source tree.
>
> Many thanks.
>
> *From:* tinnycloud [mailto:tinnycloud@hotmail.com]
> *Date:* 2010.11.23 22:58
> *TO:* 'Dan Magenheimer'; 'xen devel'
> *CC:* 'george.dunlap@eu.citrix.com'
> *Subject:* re: Xen balloon driver discuss
>
> HI Dan:
>
> Appreciate for your presentation in summarizing the memory overcommit,
> really vivid and in great help.
>
> Well, I guess recently days the strategy in my mind will fall into the
> solution Set C in pdf.
>
> The tmem solution your worked out for memory overcommit is both
> efficient and effective.
>
> I guess I will have a try on Linux Guest.
>
> The real situation I have is most of the running VMs on host are
> windows. So I had to come up those policies to balance the memory.
>
> Although policies are all workload dependent. Good news is host workload
> is configurable, and not very heavy
>
> So I will try to figure out some favorable policy. The policies referred
> in pdf are good start for me.
>
> Today, instead of trying to implement “/proc/meminfo” with shared pages,
> I hacked the balloon driver to have another
>
> workqueue periodically write meminfo into xenstore through xenbus, which
> solve the problem of xenstrore high CPU
>
> utilization problem.
>
> Later I will try to google more on how Citrix does.
>
> Thanks for your help, or do you have any better idea for windows guest?
>
> *Sent:* Dan Magenheimer [mailto:dan.magenheimer@oracle.com]
> *Date:* 2010.11.23 1:47
> *To:* MaoXiaoyun; xen devel
> *CC:* george.dunlap@eu.citrix.com
> *Subject:* RE: Xen balloon driver discuss
>
> Xenstore IS slow and you could improve xenballoond performance by only
> sending the single CommittedAS value from xenballoond in domU to dom0
> instead of all of /proc/meminfo. But you are making an assumption that
> getting memory utilization information from domU to dom0 FASTER (e.g.
> with a shared page) will provide better ballooning results. I have not
> found this to be the case, which is what led to my investigation into
> self-ballooning, which led to Transcendent Memory. See the 2010 Xen
> Summit for more information.
>
> In your last paragraph below “Regards balloon strategy”, the problem is
> it is not easy to define “enough memory” and “shortage of memory” within
> any guest and almost impossible to define it and effectively load
> balance across many guests. See my Linux Plumber’s Conference
> presentation (with complete speaker notes) here:
>
> http://oss.oracle.com/projects/tmem/dist/documentation/presentations/MemMgmtVirtEnv-LPC2010-Final.pdf
>
> http://oss.oracle.com/projects/tmem/dist/documentation/presentations/MemMgmtVirtEnv-LPC2010-SpkNotes.pdf
>
> *From:* MaoXiaoyun [mailto:tinnycloud@hotmail.com]
> *Sent:* Sunday, November 21, 2010 9:33 PM
> *To:* xen devel
> *Cc:* Dan Magenheimer; george.dunlap@eu.citrix.com
> *Subject:* RE: Xen balloon driver discuss
>
>
> Since currently /cpu/meminfo is sent to domain 0 via xenstore, which in
> my opinoin is slow.
> What I want to do is: there is a shared page between domU and dom0, and
> domU periodically
> update the meminfo into the page, while on the other side dom0 retrive
> the updated data for
> caculating the target, which is used by guest for balloning.
>
> The problem I met is, currently I don't know how to implement a shared
> page between
> dom0 and domU.
> Would it like dom 0 alloc a unbound event and wait guest to connect, and
> transfer date through
> grant table?
> Or someone has more efficient way?
> many thanks.
>
>>  From: tinnycloud@hotmail.com
>>  To: xen-devel@lists.xensource.com
>>  CC: dan.magenheimer@oracle.com; George.Dunlap@eu.citrix.com
>>  Subject: Xen balloon driver discuss
>>  Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2010 14:26:01 +0800
>>
>>  Hi:
>>  Greeting first.
>>
>>  I was trying to run about 24 HVMS (currently only Linux, later will
>>  involve Windows) on one physical server with 24GB memory, 16CPUs.
>>  Each VM is configured with 2GB memory, and I reserved 8GB memory for
>>  dom0.
>>  For safety reason, only domain U's memory is allowed to balloon.
>>
>>  Inside domain U, I used xenballooned provide by xensource,
>>  periodically write /proc/meminfo into xenstore in dom
>>  0(/local/domain/did/memory/meminfo).
>>  And in domain 0, I wrote a python script to read the meminfo, like
>>  xen provided strategy, use Committed_AS to calculate the domain U balloon
>>  target.
>>  The time interval is ! 1 seconds.
>>
>>  Inside each VM, I setup a apache server for test. Well, I'd
>>  like to say the result is not so good.
>>  It appears that too much read/write on xenstore, when I give some of
>>  the stress(by using ab) to guest domains,
>>  the CPU usage of xenstore is up to 100%. Thus the monitor running in
>>  dom0 also response quite slowly.
>>  Also, in ab test, the Committed_AS grows very fast, reach to maxmem
>>  in short time, but in fact the only a small amount
>>  of memory guest really need, so I guess there should be some more to
>>  be taken into consideration for ballooning.
>>
>>  For xenstore issue, I first plan to wrote a C program inside domain
>>  U to replace xenballoond to see whether the situation
>>  will be refined. If not, how about set up event channel directly for
>>  domU and dom0, would it be faster?
>>
>>  Regards balloon strategy, I would do like this, when there ! are
>>  enough memory , just fulfill the guest balloon request, and when shortage
>>  of memory, distribute memory evenly on the guests those request
>>  inflation.
>>
>>  Does anyone have better suggestion, thanks in advance.
>>
>