Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [Qemu-commits] [COMMIT 3086844] Instead of writing a zero page, madvise it away

[Avi Kivity]

On 06/22/2009 07:25 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Avi Kivity wrote:
> > On 06/22/2009 06:51 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> > > From: Anthony Liguori<address@hidden>
> > >
> > > Otherwise, after migration, we end up with a much larger RSS size 
> > > then we
> > > ought to have.
> >
> > We have the same issue on the migration source node.  I don't see a 
> > simple way to solve it, though.
>
> I don't follow.  In this case, the issue is:
>
> 1) Start a guest with 1024, balloon down to 128MB.  RSS size is now 
> ~128MB
> 2) Live migrate to a different node
> 3) RSS on different node jumps to ~1GB

3.5) RSS on source node jumps to ~1GB, since reading the page 
instantiates the pte

> 4) Weep at all your lost memory

4.5) And at the swapping going on in the source node

> Xen had a similar issue.  This ends up biting people who overcommit 
> their VMs via ballooning, live migration, and badness ensues.  At 
> least for us, the error is swapping but madvise also avoids the issue 
> by never consuming that memory to begin with.

Right.  I'd love to do madvise() on the source node as well if we fault 
in a page and find out it's zero, but the guest (and aio) is still 
running and we might drop live data.  We need a 
madvise(MADV_DONTNEED_IFZERO), or a mincore() flag that tells us if the 
page exists (vs. swapped).  ksm would also do this, but it is overkill 
for some applications.

Note that the patch contains a small bug -- the kernel is allowed to 
ignore the advise according to the manual page, so it's better to 
memset() the memory before dropping it.

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