[fedora-virt] disabling ksm by default

Justin M. Forbes jmforbes at linuxtx.org
Tue Oct 27 15:46:33 UTC 2009


On Tue, 2009-10-27 at 17:31 +0200, Izik Eidus wrote:
> On 10/27/2009 04:42 PM, Justin M. Forbes wrote:
>    
> > While I do understand what you are saying, I don't think it is worth making
> > a kernel change for at this point in the cycle.  Because ksm itself has a
> > separate initscript, people who wish to use ksm will likely turn it on.
> > This sets the max_kernel_pages to a reasonable value.  People who are not
> > interested enough to turn on the ksm service are probably not the kind of
> > people who will be checking to see how effective ksm is at all.
> >
> To me it sound that users have no idea about this script, and ksm merge 
> to him just the zero pages of windows 7...
> 
> My feeling is that 99% of the ppl in the world that will use it, would 
> just see the zero page merged and think "that is it..."
> The current behaivor in fedora 12 is misleading the user (at least it 
> seems to me that it misslead that specific user)
> 
> Btw we can set this value from userspace if we want "echo 0 > 
> /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run"

Where would we put that in userspace? Another init script? I just
updated to documentation on the feature page (and hopefully in the final
release notes) to say that ksm can be enabled by running 'sudo chkconfig
ksm on' in effort to draw more attention to these scripts.

The other option is to make the ksm init script default to on, and just
leave ksmtuned off at system start.  Since ksm is on by the default
kernel, all we would be doing here is changing max_kernel_pages to a
machine specific value.  The ksm init script is part of the qemu
package, so it would only be changed on systems doing virt anyway.

Justin




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