Re: [PATCH v2 6/8] kvm tools: Add rwlock wrapper

Ingo Molnar
2011-05-30T11:50:07Z

* Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 05/30/2011 02:26 PM, Takuya Yoshikawa wrote:
> >> >
> >> qemu also allows having more VCPUs than cores.
> >
> >I have to check again, then :) Thank you!
> >I will try both with many VCPUs.
>
> Note, with cpu overcommit the results are going to be bad.

And that is good: if pushed hard enough it will trigger exciting (or
obscure) bugs in the guest kernel much faster than if there's no
overcommit, so it's rather useful for testing. (We made that
surprising experience with -rt.)

Also, such simulation would be very obviously useful if you get
bugreports about 1024 or 4096 CPUs, like i do sometimes! :-) [*]

Thanks,

Ingo

[*] Would be nice if tools/kvm/ had a debug option to simulate 'lots
of RAM' as well somehow - perhaps by not pre-initializing it and
somehow catching all-zeroes pages and keeping them all zeroes and
shared? It would obviously OOM after some time but would allow me
to at least boot a fair deal of userspace. The motivation is that
i have recently received a 1 TB RAM bugreport. 1 TB of RAM mapped
with 2MB mappings should still be able to boot to shell on a 32
GB RAM testbox of mine, and survive there for some time. We could
even do some kernel modifications to make this kind of simulation
easier.