[CentOS-virt] centos6 and xen4 dom0 memory allocation

Sat Oct 22 13:21:17 UTC 2011
Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik at iki.fi>

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 12:37:34AM +0300, Peter Peltonen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This is slightly OT as xen is not officially supported in EL6. But
> maybe someone else is running it on centos6 as well and could help me
> out here:
> 
> I have problems allocating a static amount of memory for my xen dom0.
> It seems to reduce when new domUs are created, even though I *think*
> ballooning is disabled. Can someone advise me what I'm doing wrong?
> 
> I have xen-4.1.1-3 installed from
> http://xenbits.xen.org/people/mayoung/EL6.xen on my centos6 server. I
> am running 2.6.32-131.12.1.el6.xendom0.x86_64 kernel available from
> the same place. 'xl info' reports about available memory as follows:
> 
> total_memory           : 24567
> free_memory            : 3698
> xen_commandline        : dom0_mem=2048M
> 
> and in xend-config.sxp I have:
> 
> (dom0-min-mem 256)
> (enable-dom0-ballooning no)
> (total_available_memory 0)
> 
> Now one would think that I should have 2048M memory for dom0, right? I
> started from there, but when starting domUs it has been reduced to
> 1140M even though I think ballooning is disabled and there is free
> memory available? And the weird thing is that dom0 has done some
> swapping:
> 

Did you check the amount of memory in dom0 right after boot? 
You *might* need to add also "mem=2028M" cmdline option for dom0 linux kernel (vmlinuz).

Also Linux kernel is *supposed* to swap all inactive pages! 

So it's normal to have swap being used. If you have *active* swap usage 
all the time (pages in and out from swap), only then it means you don't have 
enough memory allocated.


> # free -mt
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:          1140       1052         88          0          2         12
> -/+ buffers/cache:       1038        102
> Swap:         8194         85       8109
> Total:        9335       1138       8197
> 
> Shutting down domUs and making more memory available does not reverse
> the effect, dom0 does not allocate more memory.
> 

dom0 is not supposed to allocate more memory!
dom0 is a virtual machine. Free memory goes into Xen hypervisor, check with "xl info" or "xm info".

> What am I missing here or is my xen setup acting strangely here?
> 

You're missing the fact that dom0 is a VM.

-- Pasi