[Libvir] [PATCH] Add the message when a little memory is set with setmaxmem.

[Masayuki Sunou]

Hi Daniel

I understood your suggestion.
Therefore, I decline applying this patch.

Thanks,
Masayuki Sunou.


In message <20070322101643.GA21706 at redhat.com>
   "Re: [Libvir] [PATCH] Add the message when a little memory is set with setmaxmem."
   "Daniel Veillard <veillard at redhat.com>" wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 01:56:25PM +0900, Masayuki Sunou wrote:
> > Hi
> > 
> > The message which a cause of an error is hard to detect is displayed when
> > "virsh setmaxmem" sets the maximum memory of an active domain less than
> > Used Memory.
> > 
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > # virsh setmaxmem 0 4096
> > libvir: Xen error : failed Xen syscall  ioctl  8518692
> > libvir: Xen Daemon error : POST operation failed: (xend.err "(22, 'Invalid argument')")
> > libvir: error : library call virDomainSetMaxMemory failed, possibly not supported
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > 
> > This patch displays the message which is easier to detect the cause of
> > an error to a user. 
> > 
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > # virsh setmaxmem 0 4096
> > error: 4096 is less than current used memory.
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>    Hum, this sounds useful from a user interraction perspective, but I
> have a doubt about it, first it's a bit racy, i.e. the memory usage could
> change between the GetInfo call and the SetMaxMem one, but my main problem
> is that I'm afraid this would prevent the possibility of automatic memory
> resize in some case. Assume a paravirtual guest kernel, supporting memory
> resizing, then it could in theory shrink its memory footprint if asked for
> (migrating dirty pages to swap dynamically for example). Such a mechanism
> sounds important to load balance usage between multiple guests sharing a
> host, and I'm afraid your patch would block that capacity just because 
> Xen does not accept that operation in that version.
>    I'm afraid that patch - even if limited to virsh - is unfortunately not
> a good idea, as usual the preferred way would be to get xend fixed to
> return a better error message, so I prefer to decline applying that patch
> as is. I'm also wondering if virDomainSetMemory() should not be called first
> to try to shrink and then only make the check of the current memory usage,
> the problem is that memory shrinking is likely to be a long operation in
> that case since it certainly gonna involve moving blocks to disk.
> I Cc'ed Rik who may have a more complete opinion on guest memory shrinking.
> 
> Daniel
> 
> -- 
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