Am Montag, 11. Dezember 2006 12:32 schrieb Bastian Blank: > Hi folks > > Our 2.6.18 i386 xen images sometimes dies on coredumps[1]. Fedora, which > uses the same patch, does not have this problem. The main different is > PAE, Fedora don't longer ships kernels without. I asked the Fedora Xen > maintainer but did not get a response on this problem yet. I did a quick > check with our kernel, and the problem did not show up with PAE enabled. > > We have the following possibilities: > - Ignore it. Each i386 xen machine can be crashed by a simple program. > - Switch the i386 image(s) to PAE. > - With ABI bump. > - Without ABI bump but new package names.
Hi Bastian & "folks", what about a thrid possibility (but I don't know if it's possible at all): - Have the kernel decice at boot time if pae is needed or not. If the system has >3.5 gb of ram, then use pae, else use non-pae. I am not sure if pae in general is really a good idea, because I got some problems with pae and xen on quite usual serverhardware in the past (xen 3.0.0 & 3.0.1). For example the 3ware 9xxx controllers seems to have some ugly problems with 36bit wide adressspace (pae) and until I recieved a patch from Ian Pratt for the xen hypervisor, xen was not really useable. Ian's words in this context: "PAE is a damn crook. Just a cheap hack... I hate it! Don't use it, if you don't need it." If I remember it correctly, using pae also costs a bit of performance, so it would be not wise to use it if not really needed. Bastian, have you asked the xen-devel ml if they have a clou why #399113 happens? Maybe they can help. > Bastian > > [1]: #399113 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
