Jeff Dickens wrote:
Jeff Dickens wrote:
John Nielsen wrote:
On Tuesday 03 October 2006 12:58, Jeff Dickens wrote:
I have some Freebsd systems that are running as VMware guests. I'd
like
to configure their kernels so as to minimize the overhead on the
VMware
host system. After reading and partially digesting the white paper on
timekeeping in VMware virtual machines
(http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf) it appears that I
might want to make some changes.
Has anyone addressed this issue?
I haven't read the white paper (yet; thanks for the link), but I've
had good results with recent -STABLE VM's running under ESX server
3. Some thoughts:
As I do on most of my installs, I trimmed down GENERIC to include
just the drivers I use. In this case that was mpt for the disk and
le for the network (although I suspect forcing the VM to present
e1000 hardware and then using the em driver would work as well if
not better).
The VMware tools package that comes with ESX server does a poor job
of getting itself to run, but it can be made to work without too
much difficulty. Don't use the port, run the included install script
to install the files, ignore the custom network driver and compile
the memory management module from source (included). If using X.org,
use the built-in vmware display driver, and copy the vmmouse driver
.o file from the VMware tools dist to the appropriate dir under
/usr/X11. Even though the included file is for X.org 6.8, it works
fine with 6.9/7.0 (X.org 7.1 should include the vmmouse driver.) Run
the VMware tools config script from a non-X terminal (and you can
ignore the warning about running it remotely if you're using SSH),
so it won't mess with your X display (it doesn't do anything not
accomplished above). Then run the rc.d script to start the VMware
tools.
I haven't noticed any timekeeping issues so far.
JN
_______________________________________________
What is the advantage of using the "e1000 hardware", and is this
documented somewhere? I got the vxn network driver working without
issues; I just had to edit the .vxn file manually: I'm using the
free VMware server V1 rather than the ESX server.
ethernet0.virtualDev="vmxnet"
I've got timekeeping running stably on these. I turn on time sync
via vmware tools in the .vmx file:
tools.syncTime = "TRUE"
and in the guest file's rc.conf start ntpd with flags "-Aqgx &" so it
just syncs once at boot and exits.
I'm not using X on these. They're supposed to be clean & lean
systems to run such things as djbdns and qmail. And they do work
well. My main goal is to reduce the background load on the VMware
host system so that it isn't spending more time than it has to
simulating interrupt controllers for the guests. I'm wondering about
the "disable ACPI" boot option. I suppose I first should figure out
how to even roughly measure the effect of any changes I might make.
Well, I've done some pseudo-scientific measurement on this. I
currently have five freebsd virtual systems running, and one Centos 4
(linux 2.6), This command give some info on the background cpu usage:
(The host is a Centos 3 system, linux 2.4)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] root]# ps auxww | head -1
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
[EMAIL PROTECTED] root]# ps auxww | grep vmx
root 18031 12.7 1.5 175440 39916 ? S< Oct09 345:50
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -C /var/lib/vmware/Virtual
Machines/Goose/freebsd-6.1-i386.vmx -@ ""
root 18058 12.9 1.4 174772 36916 ? S< Oct09 351:01
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -C /var/lib/vmware/Virtual
Machines/Duck/freebsd-6.1-i386.vmx -@ ""
root 18072 16.2 5.5 246372 141776 ? S< Oct09 440:16
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -C /var/lib/vmware/Virtual
Machines/BlueJay/freebsd-6.1-i386.vmx -@ ""
root 18086 12.9 1.4 174688 38464 ? S< Oct09 351:47
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -C /var/lib/vmware/Virtual
Machines/Heron/freebsd-6.1-i386.vmx -@ ""
root 18100 9.4 4.1 385712 107348 ? S< Oct09 256:25
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -C /var/lib/vmware/Virtual
Machines/Newt/freebsd-6.1-i386.vmx -@ ""
root 18139 12.2 2.5 299388 65132 ? S< Oct09 330:35
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -C /var/lib/vmware/Virtual
Machines/Centos4/Centos4.vmx -@ ""
root 28930 0.0 0.0 3680 672 pts/3 S 14:08 0:00 grep vmx
[EMAIL PROTECTED] root]#
As one can see the one called "Newt" is consistently lower in the
"%CPU" column. Curiously enough, this *is* the one I built a custom
kernel for.
The config file I used is posted below: Besides commenting out
devices I wasn't using & NFS, etc, I commented out the apic and
pctimer devices. Do you think I'm on the right track for reducing
interrupt frequency?
Also, if I were to want to move this kernel to other FreeBSD systems,
how much has to move, the whole /boot/kernel directory?
Finally I did have to re-run the vmware-config-tools.pl script after
rebuilding the kernel.
<snip>
Could anyone perhaps share their thoughts on just this part of my
question? Thanks in advance.
--->Also, if I were to want to move this kernel to other FreeBSD
systems, how much has to move, the whole /boot/kernel directory?
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