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[Qemu-devel] [Bug 992067] [NEW] Windows 2008R2 very slow cold boot when


From: Matthew Anderson
Subject: [Qemu-devel] [Bug 992067] [NEW] Windows 2008R2 very slow cold boot when >4GB memory
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:52:46 -0000

Public bug reported:

I've been having a consistent problem booting 2008R2 guests with 4096MB
of RAM or greater. On the initial boot the KVM process starts out with a
~200MB memory allocation and will use 100% of all CPU allocated to it.
The RES memory of the KVM process slowly rises by around 200mb every few
minutes until it reaches it's memory allocation (several hours in some
cases). Whilst this is happening the guest will usually blue screen with
the message of -

A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the
allocated time interval

If I let the KVM process continue to run it will eventually allocate the
required memory the guest will run at full speed, usually restarting
after the blue screen and booting into startup repair. From here you can
restart it and it will boot perfectly. Once booted the guest has no
performance issues at all.

I've tried everything I could think of. Removing PAE, playing with huge
pages, different kernels, different userspaces, different systems,
different backing file systems, different processor feature set, with or
without Virtio etc. My best theory is that the problem is caused by
Windows 2008 zeroing out all the memory on boot and something is causing
this to be held up or slowed to a crawl. The hosts always have memory
free to boot the guest and are not using swap at all.

Nothing so far has solved the issue. A few observations I've made about the 
issue are - 
Large memory 2008R2 guests seem to boot fine (or with a small delay) when they 
are the first to boot on the host after a reboot
Sometimes dropping the disk cache (echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches) will 
cause them to boot faster


The hosts I've tried are -
All Nehalem based (5540, 5620 and 5660)
Host ram of 48GB, 96GB and 192GB
Storage on NFS, Gluster and local (ext4, xfs and zfs)
QED, QCOW and RAW formats
Scientific Linux 6.1 with the standard kernel 2.6.32, 2.6.38 and 3.3.1
KVM userspaces 0.12, 0.14 and (currently) 0.15.1

** Affects: qemu
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu-
devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/992067

Title:
  Windows 2008R2 very slow cold boot when >4GB memory

Status in QEMU:
  New

Bug description:
  I've been having a consistent problem booting 2008R2 guests with
  4096MB of RAM or greater. On the initial boot the KVM process starts
  out with a ~200MB memory allocation and will use 100% of all CPU
  allocated to it. The RES memory of the KVM process slowly rises by
  around 200mb every few minutes until it reaches it's memory allocation
  (several hours in some cases). Whilst this is happening the guest will
  usually blue screen with the message of -

  A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the
  allocated time interval

  If I let the KVM process continue to run it will eventually allocate
  the required memory the guest will run at full speed, usually
  restarting after the blue screen and booting into startup repair. From
  here you can restart it and it will boot perfectly. Once booted the
  guest has no performance issues at all.

  I've tried everything I could think of. Removing PAE, playing with
  huge pages, different kernels, different userspaces, different
  systems, different backing file systems, different processor feature
  set, with or without Virtio etc. My best theory is that the problem is
  caused by Windows 2008 zeroing out all the memory on boot and
  something is causing this to be held up or slowed to a crawl. The
  hosts always have memory free to boot the guest and are not using swap
  at all.

  Nothing so far has solved the issue. A few observations I've made about the 
issue are - 
  Large memory 2008R2 guests seem to boot fine (or with a small delay) when 
they are the first to boot on the host after a reboot
  Sometimes dropping the disk cache (echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches) will 
cause them to boot faster

  
  The hosts I've tried are -
  All Nehalem based (5540, 5620 and 5660)
  Host ram of 48GB, 96GB and 192GB
  Storage on NFS, Gluster and local (ext4, xfs and zfs)
  QED, QCOW and RAW formats
  Scientific Linux 6.1 with the standard kernel 2.6.32, 2.6.38 and 3.3.1
  KVM userspaces 0.12, 0.14 and (currently) 0.15.1

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