On Friday 14 January 2005 08:02 am, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 07:05 -0800, Matthew Marlowe wrote:
> > - The 2.6.x based releases have a horrible impact on server performance.
> > Interrupts go up from 200/s to 3,000/s and context switches increase from
> > 2-4K/s to 30K+.  After install, if you use a 2.4.x kernel and switch HZ
> > to ~30, things return to normal.
>
> Is this a 2.6-based problem or do you think it is specific to our kernel
> configurations?  Would you be willing to test out a new minimal LiveCD
> in this environment, let's say with preempt enabled and some other
> possible speed improvements.
>

I'm not sure how much of the issue is gentoo 2.6 kernel specific vs generic
2.6.  At the very least, I know that 2.6 has HZ set to 1000 by default which
isn't very scaleable.  Also, some vmware kernel modules, especially for ESX,
will not compile under 2.6.x (unless someone has patches I haven't found).  

> > - GSX and ESX support a greater range of hardware drivers, in particular,
> > the vmxnet nic driver which isn't detected in 2004.3.
>
> Show me where I can get it, and I'll include it.
>

It's part of vmware tools.  The module source is usually in one of the 
subdirectories of /usr/lib/vmware-tools.

> > - vmware tools isn't in portage yet, at least last I checked.  This might
> > not be a big deal for those managing 1 vm, but can be quite painful if
> > you have dozens.
>
> Show me where I can get it, and I'll add it to portage.  I couldn't find
> a download on their site.

It is part of every vmware install.  I'm not sure about the licensing.  We can
always force users to manually put the tar ball in distfiles, like I believe 
we do with the vmware workstation downloads.  Most of my ESX/GSX installs 
share a nfs mounted distfiles so that would work fine for me too.

I do see some issues with various versions of vmware requiring different
releases of vmware-tools.  ESX 2.1 might require different from GSX which
might require different from workstation 5 beta?

Regards,
Matt

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