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Re: [Xen-users] Memory overcommitment in Xen.


  • To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • From: "Austin S. Hemmelgarn" <ahferroin7@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2016 07:52:38 -0500
  • Delivery-date: Mon, 05 Dec 2016 12:53:50 +0000
  • List-id: Xen user discussion <xen-users.lists.xen.org>

On 2016-12-05 03:01, Simon Hobson wrote:
Jason Long <hack3rcon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

But I like to know it did by Xen automatically or need to enable it?

You have to configure it.
In your guest VM configs, you need to specify both the maximum memory the guest 
is to have, and a setting for it's ballon driver to ballon down to after the 
guest has started - unless you are going to manually manage it.
Under older versions, these settings would do the job :
memory  = '2048'
maxmem  = '4096'
I vaguely recall some discussion here that it doesn't work under newer versions 
- but checking the most up to date host I have, it seems to be running that VM 
with 2G of memory.
I think you're thinking of a thread I had been involved with which discussed transcendent memory and overcommit, and starting pre-ballooned does not currently work correctly with Linux guests when using transcendent memory. It does however work right without having tmem enabled in the guest OS.

But as already mentioned, you need to fully understand what's going on. The settings 
above will NOT start the VM with only 2G allocated. It will start the VM with 4G 
allocated and it relies on the balloon driver to "release" the spare 2G. 
Depending on how you start the VMs, and what they do with memory while booting, this can 
have some undesirable performance issues. If you parallel start all the VMs, and they do 
things like scrubbing all the ram on boot, then you can cause some significant 
performance issues - in the very extreme, causing a guest to be killed.

https://blog.xenproject.org/2014/02/14/ballooning-rebooting-and-the-feature-youve-never-heard-of/


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