On Saturday 11 December 2004 19:27, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I'm continuing to find the 2.6.8.1 w/ ska3-v7 host and 2.6.9 w/ bb4 very
> stable.  However, now that I've gotten beyond, what I consider,
> infrastructure problems, I'm seeing behavior I don't understand.

> I'm specifically investigating uml from the perspective of partitioning
> hardware resources, in this case persistant and volatile memory, so my
> guests are running their root file and swap filesystems on their own
> dedicated disk partitions.
[...]

> At this point `top` on the host shows approx. 153040 used  101352 avail.
>
>  `df /mnt/ram6` shows over 50000K available.
>
> Even though `top` on the guest shows approx. 56916 ttl  20032 used  36884
> avail
>
>
> If I now run `find / -name "*.c" -print | xargs grep include` in the guest
> the host's available memory gets sucked down to the 2500 - 2000 K range in
> about three seconds.
Which value are you using from "free" output? Make sure you're using the "-/+ 
buffers/cache:" one, which is the only one to use.

> The guest's available memory eventually gets sucked down to about 850k but
> it takes at least twice as long as on the host.
>
> Neither the host nor the guest use any swap.
>
>  `df /mnt/ram6` (host of course) still shows over 22000K available.
>
>
> If I `halt` the guest, the host jumps from 2500K to almost 150000K
> available just as the guest "powers down".
>
>  `df /mnt/ram6` is now back to over 60000K available.
>
>
>
> So it seems my guest is using some of my ram disk, but only about two
> thirds of it -- and a lot of host ram.
>
>
>
> In an attempt to test this, I rebooted and repeated all the above steps,
> except I lied to the uml and told it that it had three times more memory
> than the $TMPDIR partition.
>
>  `linux ubd0=/dev/hda6 ubd1=/dev/hda5 mem=180000K
> eth0=tuntap,,,192.168.0.254`
>
> `top` on the guest now happily reported 153240K available at the start.
>
> Everything went down similarly when I ran the `find`; the host sucked down
> its available memory very quickly -- although this time it did eventually
> swap.  The guest gobbled up its available memory also, but at a slower
> rate. I expected it to crash after it used 60000K, and then 120000K, but it
> used up just about all its reported "available" memory and still kept
> running for a while.  It never used any of its own swap.

> Continuously running `df /mnt/ram6` showed the free memory eventually go
> right to zero, shortly before the guest segfaulted.
Checked the value without the cache size?
> My impression is that the guest is not using its "dedicated" ram or swap
> very efficiently.
2.6.9 kernels, on any arch, often go OOM instead of swapping (discussed 
somewhere on http://lwn.net/Kernel).

> It also seems to be able to get into the host's ram 
> somehow.
Hmm, quite unlikely...
-- 
Paolo Giarrusso, aka Blaisorblade
Linux registered user n. 292729
http://www.user-mode-linux.org/~blaisorblade


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