Re: The performance and behaviour of the anti-fragmentation related patches

Balbir Singh
2007-03-02T01:52:37Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Mar 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> So some urgent questions are: how are we going to do mem hotunplug and
>> per-container RSS?
>
> Also: how are we going to do this in virtualized environments? Usually the
> people who care abotu memory hotunplug are exactly the same people who
> also care (or claim to care, or _will_ care) about virtualization.
>
> My personal opinion is that while I'm not a huge fan of virtualization,
> these kinds of things really _can_ be handled more cleanly at that layer,
> and not in the kernel at all. Afaik, it's what IBM already does, and has
> been doing for a while. There's no shame in looking at what already works,
> especially if it's simpler.

Could you please clarify as to what "that layer" means - is it the
firmware/hardware for virtualization? or does it refer to user space?
With virtualization the linux kernel would end up acting as a hypervisor
and resource management support like per-container RSS support needs to
be built into the kernel.

It would also be useful to have a resource controller like per-container
RSS control (container refers to a task grouping) within the kernel or
non-virtualized environments as well.

--
Warm Regards,
Balbir Singh
Linux Technology Center
IBM, ISTL