Re: [Xen-devel] Live migration fails when available memory exactly equal to required memory on target system

[Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 17 Jul 2006, at 20:17, Graham, Simon wrote:

> This time, we can see that there was only 264MB free so we had to kick
> the balloon driver to free up 1MB - once this was done (and we had
> exactly 265MB free again), we were able to increase the reservation for
> the target DomU to the requested amount...
>
> The above is fairly reproducible but I'm not sure where to go next to
> figure out where the issue really is (or, indeed, if there really is an
> issue -- maybe this is just one of those inherently racy things;
> however, I find it odd that it only seems to happen when the initial
> free is exactly the same as the desired; I have plenty of other cases
> where there is way more and way less memory available all of which seem
> to work just fine).
Maybe there's a rounding error in the dom0 ballooning code. Your best 
bet is to get tracing out of Xen, which can tell you exactly how many 
pages are on Xen's free lists and how many are requested for the new 
domain being created -- a debug build of Xen would be a good start as 
that will turn on the DPRINTK tracing in Xen. Also bear in mind that 
the amount of free memory is always fluctuating in a live system -- for 
example the Xen network drivers are continually freeing and allocating 
memory to/from Xen. So if the dom0 ballooning logic is only freeing 
*exactly* what is required then that is probably a bit stupid: maybe 
some slack needs to be added (or the amount of slack increased).
 -- Keir


_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel