On Monday, April 04, 2011 8:37:09 PM Robert LeBlanc wrote: > Be careful, the host needs to know how the ballooning is working. When > the guest driver balloons, it tells the host which memory pages are in > the balloon. The host then trashes those pages and uses them for > something else. When the guest is pressured for memory and the balloon > deflates, the host will have to either swap those pages to disk to > release them as in the case of being used as disk cache. You can't just > use any balloon technique, KVM needs to understand and coordinate with > it. Unfortunately I don't know enough about KVM, I only use it for a > couple of Windows only apps that I tried really hard to get to work > under WINE and couldn't on my netbook. I can tell you all about VMware's > memory ballooning, page sharing and compression though.
I haven't used ballooning in KVM either. I have used in VMware and after a few months I turned it off. It managed to thrash one of my critical Linux VMs when, in my opinion, it didn't need to. So now I just plan resources well, and make sure not to give an VM more than it needs. -- Alberto Treviño BYU Testing Center Brigham Young University [email protected] -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
