Re: FreeBSD PVHVM call for testing

["Roger Pau Monné" <roger.pau@citrix.com>]

On 22/07/13 09:18, Jeroen van der Ham wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> After some more testing I thought it would be good to put this into production for my personal server. I've used pvhvm_v19 and built it without debugging options and installed it on a FreeBSD 9.1 system.
> 
> I've run into some hiccups with 9.1 user land and a 10-CURRENT kernel, but that's all solvable[0].
> 
> My VPS has some very limited memory (256M), but I've compensated with swap space (1G)

Is your guest running a 32bit or a 64bit kernel?

Could you also provide the config file used to launch your guest and the
Xen and Dom0 kernel versions?

> 
> Now anytime I'm putting the system under stress, by building ports or by running a git clone on the kernel repository here, I'm seeing a lot of messages about swap_pager:
> 
>> swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 132545, size: 4096
> 
> The system also becomes very sluggish and sometimes unresponsive.
> The weird thing was that one of these messages happened right after a reboot when I rebuilt an outdated port and on the main console was checking the swap memory:
> 
>> jeroen:~/ $ swapinfo                                                  [8:13:29]
>> Device          1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity
>> /dev/ada0p2        524288     2484   521804     0%
>> /dev/md0          1048576     2364  1046212     0%
>> Total             1572864     4848  1568016     0%
>> swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 131424, size: 4096
> 
> 
> Is anyone else seeing something similar?

Could you also try a HEAD XENHVM kernel (without my patches), to see if
the issue is related to my changes or to some bug already present in HEAD?

> I certainly did not experience something like this on 9.0 with a XENHVM kernel.
> 
> If necessary I can rebuild a kernel with debugging support and do some more recording of what is actually going on.
> 
> Jeroen.
> 
> 
> [0]: I have edited bsd.port.mk to always apply the FBSD10_FIX, and for version checking I am  running "pkg version" with UNAME_r=9.1-RELEASE.
>