RE: [Xen-users] XEN hardware compatibility list

["Petersson, Mats" <mats.petersson@xxxxxxx>]

Having some understanding of the inner workings of the CPU's Speed/Power handling, I can see how it would be necessary for the Xen portion to be the manager of frequency switching, as Dom0 or DomU doesn't know what's going on in any of the other domains per se. I guess it would technically be possible to have a monitor process in Dom0 that manages the speed of the CPU, but it's probably better to do this in Xen itself.

 

However, I don't see the laptop market being a BIG portion of the Xen installations, so I'm somewhat dubious as to how much interest there would be in this [Yes, I'd love to see it done, but I'm also realistic in the expectation of this happening].

 

As to hyperthreading or not, I would expect it to be very dependant on the behaviour of the application, just as when you're not running Xen. Xen will use the two HT "processors" to run on if it's enabled. Whether this gives you more, less or the same computing power as one processor depends on what your system is doing [You can probably find a benchmark for each of those three options, if you look around a bit]. Cache-hit rate, cache-collisions, memory bandwidth and many other things will affect the performance in HT (as well as in any other processor performance scenario, of course). [By the way, it's entirely possible to make a "proper" dual processor system run crap too, if you make sure that cache-lines are interchanged due to cache-collisions, for instance].

 

--

Mats

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From: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of koxman
Sent: 27 July 2005 07:05
To: Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Xen-users] XEN hardware compatibility list

Hello

I tried both XEN 2.0.6 and 3.0 on my ASUS M6800NE notebook.

2.0.6 - overheating  and hang  when  start to use  more  CPU (ACPI is not present in this version)
3.0    -  runing fine but generaly but integrated Broadcom gigabit network card is not working

With both versions is not posible to use cpufreq/speefreq like utilities for CPU throtling.


Based on my explorations - please can you write down your hw related xen experiences?

I am planing to build server for servis DomU´s - do you have any recommendations?

I am looking for something like:

2xOpteron
4GB RAM
AMD or nForce4 Pro chipset
RAID 1 from SATA disks

Anybody has some experience with Xen stable on nForce chipset - both desktop and server version?

Does it worth to use Hyperthreading on Intel when running Xen?


Thanks

koxman

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