Kir, Here's a suggestion for you to consider: discontinue -ent and non-PAE kernels. Non-PAE on i686 makes little sense. The performance impact of PAE is hardly even measurable on real-world usage, but PAE buys us NX bit support. So recommending PAE only for 4 GB RAM or more is "wrong".
Now, I've heard that some older Pentium M and Celeron M CPUs (found in some laptops) don't do PAE, but do we care about those all that much (in pre-built kernels)? Sure, experimenting with OpenVZ on a laptop makes sense, but modern laptops support PAE fine. Other than that, PAE dates back to Pentium Pro (mid-1990s). As to -ent, it has a huge performance impact. The http://wiki.openvz.org/Kernel_flavors page somehow says that it's better with a larger number of containers, but I think that's wrong. It was a hack to allow for large multi-threaded, mmap'ing and caching enterprisey apps (mostly Oracle?) to run on 4 GB RAM 32-bit x86 servers from some years ago (when x86-64 was not around). When you have many small apps (or many containers with such apps), you do not need this hack - the system will likely be faster without it. Ironically, this hack also improved kernel security (mitigating the impact of the kernel inadvertently dereferencing a user pointer or NULL), but very few users would be willing to pay a 30% performance penalty for that. Even if/when you stop providing -ent and non-PAE builds, perhaps you should still be making test builds with such configs - to make sure the kernel builds with a variety of settings. Thanks, Alexander _______________________________________________ Users mailing list [email protected] https://openvz.org/mailman/listinfo/users
