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Re: [Xen-devel] Questions about GPLPV stability tests



Not in this year of my stability tests. In this year I am always
experiencing crashes of domU only. dom0 was always stable.
But last year, I hunted a very serious problem which causes nasty
hangs/crashes in dom0 (which crashes domU as a consequence). See this
mailing list post:
http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2010-09/msg00556.html
In my tests it clearly shows that if you have a CPU without ARAT and you
don't have the patch from my post, your Xen 4.0.1 or 4.1.1 will crash under
load and/or after a while. What is your CPU?
Most of our machines use i7 950 CPUs. They don't seem to have ARAT.

Yes, i7 950 does not have ARAT as it is the first Nehalem generation.

Some other machines use Xeon CPUs with ARAT support. We never had
issues on the Xeon systems, so we may actually be suffering from the
ARAT issue. Are you still using the patch you linked to in a
production environment?

Absolutely. As I mentioned I just re-performed tests recently and found that even Xen 4.1.1 (earlier tests were for 4.0.1) is unstable without my patch on non-ARAT-CPUs.

> I wonder why a cleaned up patch like that never made it into core.

The patch actually only disables HPET broadcast which has some downsides because it effectively disables C3 states. Without C3 states Nehalem and later CPUs cannot enter turbo-mode. So there is some loss of performance.

I'm going to do some testing (may take a while).

Please let me know. There are already some people confirming that HPET broadcast is buggy. With more evidence I will contact Keir again and suggest to have it (HPET broadcast) fixed or removed.

Regards Andreas

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