RE: [Xen-ia64-devel] [PATCH] [Resend]Enable hash vtlb

["Xu, Anthony" <anthony.xu@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Alex,

I'll kill off all daemons on native and Dom0, and I'll try
to enlarge memory on Dom0 and DomU.
I'll send out the data later.

Thanks,
Anthony


>From: Alex Williamson 
>Sent: 2006?4?10? 23:14
>To: Xu, Anthony
>Cc: xen-ia64-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: RE: [Xen-ia64-devel] [PATCH] [Resend]Enable hash vtlb
>
>On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 23:01 +0800, Xu, Anthony wrote:
>
>> If we configure domU with memory 256MB, domU will complain "at least 256M
>> is needed."
>> Yes there should a best ratio of memory size of domU and size of VHPT.
>
>My tests are:
>
>dom0: boot w/ dom0_mem=768M, kill off all daemons, build
>domU: boot w/ default dom0 mem (512MB), kill all daemons in dom0,
>specify 768M memory from domU, boot domU, kill all domU daemons, build
>
>256MB certainly isn't enough memory to have a worthwhile kernel build
>benchmark.
>
>> >   I don't understand this result.  I was surprised to see domU perform
>> >better than dom0 in my testing, but I can't see how domU could perform
>> >better than bare metal.  Perhaps 512MB is insufficient for kernel
>> >builds.  You may be disproportionately benefiting from dom0's buffer
>> >cache.
>> >
>> I think there maybe two reasons.
>> 1. As you said, domU benefits from dom0's buffer cache. There are somewhat
>> parallel executions. DomU is response of compilation, Dom0 is response of
>> read/write of disk.
>> 2. The services running on Dom0 or DomU are less than that on native machine.
>
>   Services can also be stopped on the native machine.  I did this in my
>test case.  I think it's very possible that 512MB is not a sufficient
>amount of memory for a valid test.  768MB may not be enough either.  To
>properly benchmark this change we need to have the entire working set of
>the test fit in memory (preferably we'd do the builds out of a tmpfs
>mount to avoid I/O entirely).  If we have extra activity, like swapping
>or text getting pushed out of buffer cache and reloaded, anything we can
>read into the results is suspect.  Thanks,
>
>       Alex
>
>--
>Alex Williamson                             HP Linux & Open Source Lab

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