On 15-06-2020 23:42, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
On 6/15/20 2:46 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On Sun, 14 Jun 2020 at 14:49, Manuel Wolfshant wolfy@nobugconsulting.ro wrote:
Hello
For the past months I've been testing upgrading my Xen hosts to CentOS 7 and I face an issue for which I need your help to solve.
The testing machines are IBM blades, model H21 and H21XM. Initial tests were performed on the H21 with 16 GB RAM; during the last 6=7 weeks I've been using the H21XM with 64 GB. In all cases the guests were fully updated CentOS 7 -- initially 7.6 ( most recent at the time of the initial tests ), and respectively 7.8 for the tests performed during the last 2 months. As host I used initially CentOS 6 with latest kernel available in the centos virt repo at the time of the tests and CentOS 7 with the latest kernel as well. As xen versions I tested 4.8 and 4.12 ( xl info included below ). The storage for the last tests is a Crucial MX500 but results were similar when using traditional HDD.
My problem, in short, is that the guests are extremely slow. For instance , in the most recent tests, a yum install kernel takes cca 1 min on the host and 12-15 (!!!) minutes in the guest, all time being spent in dracut regenerating the initramfs images. I've done rough tests with the storage ( via dd if=/dev/zero of=a_test_file size bs=10M count=1000 ) and the speed was comparable between the hosts and the guests. The version of the kernel in use inside the guest also did not seem to make any difference . OTOH, sysbench ( https://github.com/akopytov/sysbench/ ) as well as p7zip benchmark report for the guests a speed which is between 10% and 50% of the host. Quite obviously, changing the elevator had no influence either.
Here is the info which I think that should be relevant for the software versions in use. Feel free to ask for any additional info.
Is there a way to boot up a PV guest versus an HVM?
If I understood the docs correctly, newer xen does only PVHVM ( xen_platform_pci=1 activates that ) and HVM. But they say it's better than PV. And I did verify, PVHVM is indeed enabled and active
You can also test running your Linux domUs as Xen PVH [1], which requires kernel 4.11 and Xen 4.10 as a minimum.
[1] https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Linux_PVH