[Xen-devel] Cloning a VM and copy-on-write deduplicating memory using CoW page sharing in Xen 4+

[Patrick Wilbur <patrick.wilbur@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey all,

Hey Andres,

I'm looking to clone a VM into several extremely-similar VMs, and I'm hoping to also make use of your lovely new CoW page sharing capabilities in Xen 4.  

From my understanding of a previous thread where Andres described the process of sharing/coalescing memory between VMs, it sounds like I will need to "manually" coalesce each page using a homebrew tool of mine.  The issue I have with doing this is it seems like I'd need to pause, save mem, load mem in a new VM, coalesce, and resume two VMs, which seems painful and wasteful of a process for cloning!

Is there an easier way to do this, or should we add a new feature for CoW cloning of VMs in Xen via a userspace tool?

Thanks,

Pat Wilbur & team


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