[vbox-dev] Speeding up VM boot/restore

[Nicolay Vizovitin]

Hello.

On 7/12/10, Alexey Eremenko <al4321 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think a theoretical way may exist to speed up things by using memory
> ballooning...
>
> This will actually "take away" RAM from the VM, having less RAM needed
> to save/restore...
>
> What do you think?

I think this should actually work. And with proper implementation this
would work quite good in our case.

However the question is in the cost of this solution. As far as I know
VirtualBox does not support memory ballooning. The concept behind
memory ballooning seems quite simple. However I'm not able to
accurately estimate how hard it will be to add support for this
feature in VirtualBox.

So, any suggestions on how hard it is, what it will involve and where
to start are greatly appreciated.

Also I'd like to know, whether there are any useful materials that can
help to understand how memory ballooning should be implemented. E.g.
maybe there are some good articles or some open source software that
makes use of it.

Another idea that may help is sharing memory pages between multiple
concurrently running VM instances. (We plan to run concurrently
several machines that are "forked" from one saved state and slightly
differ. Their life span is also quite short.) Do you think this is a
feasible and reasonable solution?

Thank you for all your help!


--Best regards,
  Nicolay