[Pkg-xen-devel] Xend not starting (Lenny backport of Xen 3.4.3-rc3)

[Thomas Goirand]

Thomas Goirand wrote:
> Just a bit of feedback now: I've been running Xen 3.4.2 on my laptop for
> few days now (without xend, but still under Xen), and I have a very
> snappy feeling: my desktop seems to run as fast as when running without
> Xen, which was not at all the case last November when running 3.3.1 and
> the pv_ops dom0 patch of the time.

Another feedback, negative this time. If in grub, I put:

kernel          /boot/xen-3.4-amd64.gz dom0_mem=2048M

then when starting KDM, it gets stuck and doesn't work. If I press e in
grub, remove the dom0_mem part, then my laptop is able to boot and start
X window. Quite annoying, because I quite want to use the directive. It
might be linked to the experimental version of the graphic driver that
I'm using, but I also read that others had issues with X, so I thought
this could be interesting.

Then another very strange behavior. Once I start using xend, I do:

root at GPLHost:buzzig>_ ~# xm info
total_memory           : 3990
free_memory            : 131
root at GPLHost:buzzig>_ ~# xm list
Name                                        ID   Mem VCPUs      State
Time(s)
Domain-0                                     0  3800     2     r-----
  54.8
root at GPLHost:buzzig>_ ~# xm mem-set Domain-0 2048
root at GPLHost:buzzig>_ ~# xm list
Name                                        ID   Mem VCPUs      State
Time(s)
Domain-0                                     0  2048     2     r-----
  56.3
root at GPLHost:buzzig>_ ~# xm info
total_memory           : 3990
free_memory            : 1113


After I set my dom0 to use 2048 MB of RAM, I get only 1113 MB of free
RAM. It as if a part of the RAM (829 MB of RAM) has gone! Quite wacko
isn't it? Could it be that the memory management is broken somehow? I'll
try to dig further.

Thomas