[Netkit.users] Enormous disk usage on Fedora Core 4

[Massimo Rimondini]

Hello Antony,

the answer is: definitely not. It is not normal. This seems to be an
evidence of either one of the following facts:
1) the UML kernel (the kernel of virtual machines) has some problems with
filesystem handling;
2) virtual machines are performing strange operations during their boot
phase.

In order to check for this, I suggest you to proceed as follows:
- start a single virtual machine (vstart pc)
- check the status of disk activity
- check if there is some ongoing activity inside the virtual machine
during its boot (look at the list of running processes, check for the
amount of available disk space inside the virtual machines, etc.)
- check whether the size of the .disk file (on the host machine) is
growing as well during this phase
- crash the virtual machine (by using vcrash)
- check the size of the .disk file once more

Consider that .disk files just store differences between the model
filesystem ($NETKIT_HOME/fs/netkit-fs) and the actual contents of the
virtual machines filesystem. Hence, they are expected to be usually very
small (people often make very little changes to the configuration of the
virtual machines).

Regards,
Massimo.


> Maybe I found the reason why my Fedora is so slow in trying to bring up
> virtual machines: the .disk files created by lstart are very big! Is it
> normal? Thank you very much in advance. Regards,
>
> Ice
>
> [ice a vega netkit-lab_bgp-1-simple-peering]$ ls -lh
> totale 1,2G
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ice ice  633 30 set 17:02 changes
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ice ice  230 30 set 17:44 lab.conf
> drwxr-xr-x  3 ice ice 8,0K 23 apr  2005 router1
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ice ice 602M 25 ott 18:23 router1.disk
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ice ice   98 25 ott 18:23 router1.log
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ice ice   99 23 apr  2005 router1.startup
> drwxr-xr-x  3 ice ice 8,0K 23 apr  2005 router2
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ice ice 602M 25 ott 18:23 router2.disk
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ice ice  170 25 ott 18:23 router2.log
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ice ice   97 23 apr  2005 router2.startup
>
>
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