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Extreme Memory Oversubscription For VMs
Laxitive writes "Virtualization systems currently have a pretty easy time oversubscribing CPUs (running lots of VMs on a few CPUs), but have had a very hard time oversubscribing memory. GridCentric, a virtualization startup, just posted on their blog a video demoing the creation of 16 one-gigabyte desktop VMs (running X) on a computer with just 5 gigs of RAM. The blog post includes a good explanation of how this is accomplished, along with a description of how it's different from the major approaches being used today (memory ballooning, VMWare's page sharing, etc.). Their method is based on a combination of lightweight VM cloning (sort of like fork() for VMs) and on-demand paging. Seems like the 'other half' of resource oversubscription for VMs might finally be here."
Why is a factually accurate, topical, informative, and polite message marked troll?
I'm assuming you've already heard of it, but you can use something like ksplice to patch up the kernel on the fly. It's not necessary to skip updates even if you want 100% uptime.
which is totally what she said