Hugepages and KVM

I've seen the benefits of hugepages before when setting up Oracle and MySQL, but while doing some research I found an article on how to use them with KVM. However, patching /sbin/start_udev and creating an init script to make sure it stays patched just seems like a horrendous idea just to get hugetlbfs mounted on /dev/hugepages. My non-intrusive method is as follows:

1) teach MAKEDEV how to "create the directory" /dev/hugepages on boot. Actually it is creating an additional /dev/null device at /dev/hugepages/null, but it should be harmless to have multiple "null" (major 1, minor 3) devices and also harmless to mount on top of it.

echo 'c $ALLWRITE 1 3 1 1 hugepages/null' > /etc/makedev.d/01hugepages

2) tell udev to create it on boot if needed:

echo 'hugepages/null' > /etc/udev/makedev.d/52-hugepages.nodes

3) tell udev what the right permissions are for it:

echo 'KERNEL=="hugepages*", OWNER="root", GROUP="root", MODE="0775"' > /etc/udev/rules.d/52-hugepages.rules

4) Under CentOS/RHEL run "huge_page_setup_helper.py" to get your hugepages setup

5) Set the hugetlbfs to be mounted on boot:

echo 'hugetlbfs /dev/hugepages hugetlbfs defaults 0 0' >> /etc/fstab

That's it! After a reboot, you can check that hugepages are setup with "sysctl vm.nr_hugepages" and "grep -i huge /proc/meminfo" and check that hugetlbfs is mounted with "mount | grep huge".

Check /proc/meminfo once your KVM guests start to make sure the number of free pages decreases. If not confirm your guest's XML file has "<memoryBacking><hugepages/></memoryBacking>" below the "<currentmemory>" section and that they have "-mem-prealloc -mem-path /dev/hugepages/libvirt/qemu" in the qemu-kvm command line (it should be auto-set by libvirt).

Getting timing out of curl


curl -w " \
time_total %{time_total} \
time_connect %{time_connect} \
time_namelookup %{time_namelookup} \
time_pretransfer %{time_pretransfer} \
time_starttransfer %{time_starttransfer} \
time_redirect %{time_redirect}\n" http://www.example.com


Notes on burning a DVD using Linux

I can't believe I haven't done this before. I guess my desktop has always had a burner and a gui program to do this. Anyway after searching and finding some links, I'm making some notes for next time.

TITLE="012345678901234"
SOURCE_DIR="/path/to/files"
mkisofs -v -A $TITLE -V $TITLE -J -r -o dvd.iso $SOURCE_DIR
eject -t dvd
cdrecord -scanbus dev=ATA # find your DVD burner in the list
cdrecord -v dev=ATA:1,1,0 driveropts=burnfree -dao dvd.iso
eject dvd

I'm sure there's better ways to do this, but it worked pretty well for the first attempt.

rpm queryformat

Another reminder to myself - rpm query to show installed RPMs formatted with name of the file as they were installed (as per the default CentOS/RHEL naming scheme on the install media):

rpm -qa --qf '%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}.rpm\n'