From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andi Kleen Subject: Re: Reducing impact of save/restore/dump on Dom0 Date: 07 Feb 2007 13:11:05 +0100 Message-ID: References: <342BAC0A5467384983B586A6B0B3767104A69BB9@EXNA.corp.stratus.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: In-Reply-To: <342BAC0A5467384983B586A6B0B3767104A69BB9@EXNA.corp.stratus.com> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: "Graham, Simon" Cc: xen-devel@lists.xensource.com List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org "Graham, Simon" writes: > Currently, save, restore and dump all used cached I/O in Dom0 to > write/read the file containing the memory image of the DomU - when the > memory assigned to the DomU is greater than free memory in Dom0, this > leads to severe memory thrashing and generally the Dom0 performance goes > into the toilet. > > The 'classic' answer to avoiding this when writing very large files is, > of course, to use non-cached I/O to manipulate the files - Otherwise you can just use madvise()/fadvise() to tell the kernel to drop the old data [the later might need a fairly recent kernel to work] It has the advantage that it doesn't need much other changes. -Andi