I have been reading articles on booting, nowhere I found info about booting in Hibernation mode. Is it a warm booting or cold booting?
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-cold-booting-and-warm-booting/
For what it's worth, there is this answer on Quora:
Hibernation process will store whatever data on RAM into hard drive
before the machine is turned off. Resuming from hibernation will
result computer in starting on cold boot, however it will load
whatever contents on the RAM just as before the computer hibernates.
As a side note, SO usually isn't the place to ask that kind of hardware questions, especially when no code is involved. Take a look at SuperUser instead. :)
Related
I am writing a server app which I want to efficiently use ALL available physical RAM of the machine when possible. The plan is that it will allocate physical pages using AWE until it detects that 99% of physical memory and stop when 1% is free, and any time physical memory drops below 1% free, it will free physical pages it doesn't need.
However when I put this plan into practice, Windows seems to think any time it has 99% of RAM in use it would be a good idea to free up more physical memory, and so it starts paging all sorts of stuff to disk, and my system crashes.
How can I tell Windows it is OK to have 99% of RAM in use and it doesn't need to try to page stuff back to disk until it reaches whatever its default perceived ideal level of usage is (I guess it will be something like 90%...)
Note: Raymond says 'Unless you are designing a system where you are the only program running on the computer, this is a bad idea.'
In this server scenario this is basically intended to be the only app running on the computer. But unfortunately there are some OS/background tasks that need to run...
But certainly I don't expect there is any other process on the computer indulging in this 'use all but 1% of RAM' behavior...?
Update: I've done more experimentation and started to wonder if I'm somewhat asking the wrong question. My assumption that windows is being overeager may be wrong. Perhaps the question should instead have been 'how can I determine how much physical RAM my process can safely use without compromising overall responsiveness on the machine'?
You can't. The Windows memory manager runs at a lower level than your program and knows nothing about your program (and even if it did, it has no reason to assume your program is the good citizen you claim it to be. What if your program crashes, or has an off-by-one error in a loop that mallocs? What about other programs that need memory while yours is running? What about the thousand other scenarios that the guys who wrote the Windows MM encountered when they were writing it?)
Don't try to be cleverer than Windows. A more productive use of your time would be to consider if your application really needs to allocate 99% physical memory up front.
I am running redis on windows and I am having some performance issues. The machine is a Xeon E5 with 32GM RAM and SSD with HW-Raid with Windows Server 2012. There are some other processes running, but they are not critical and are idle most of the time.
I noticed performance problems and operations timeout very often, so I started "redis-cli --intrinsic-latency 100". The output shows that the max-latency goes up to 15000 microseconds, which is very slow I think.
I was also running a memory-profiler: The r/w-performance is not so good (5GB/sec) but I think this should not be the bottleneck. At the moment I have absolutly no idea what to try.
Can you give me some tipps how to find the performance problem?
There is no "fork" as in Linux in Windows. So when you dump your redis db, it can just "stop the world" in order to write on the disk "dump.rdb". Well, they did implement a "Copy-on-write" strategy that don't stop redis, it just copies values when dumping (the redis clients will still be able to get responses from redis). It is in their version log: https://github.com/MSOpenTech/Redis
There is a replacement for the UNIX fork() API that simulates the copy-on-write behavior using a memory mapped file.
This is the real bottleneck of redis in windows as it is an overhead and is more complex (bugs?). It is explained here:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2012/04/26/here-s-to-the-first-release-from-ms-open-tech-redis-on-windows.aspx
As a result you could try running a redis on Linux to test if this is a performance issue of the windows port. Also, the more you write a dump.rdb, the bigger is the overhead (you can change the frequency or try disabling it completely for testing).
Finally, it could also be a network problem and you should check if it is not a network rule / hardware problem (not enough throughput! Bad cable or stuff, firewalls...). Are your redis clients on the same hardware machine?
I have been using a Windows port of Redis called "Memurai". They have a developer edition free of charge.
Now, in one of their blog they claim they have solved the fork() problem. See excerpt below.
Memurai performance seems good to me, even with persistence enabled (both RDB and AOF) although I have not run any specific test myself. There's another blog about Memurai perf in here.
It's worth giving it a try.
"Internally, Redis uses the fork() system call to perform asynchronous writes, but that’s not an option for Memurai because fork() doesn’t exist on Windows. Instead, Memurai uses Windows shared memory to implement a start-of-the-art version of fork() that’s finely tuned for performance and..."
I have a machine that periodically BSOD's. I have full memory dumps configured. Sometimes, when rebooting AFTER the BSOD, the machine sits on a black screen for several minutes, then finally comes up to windows. My colleague just recently found out that during this time, the machine was writing the full memory dump to disk.
He identified this by shutting the machine down on the BSOD, plugging the drive in as a slave, seeing that no dump file was present, plugging it back into a machine, seeing the black screen for several minutes, and then finding the memory dump on disk.
So my question is, how does this work, internally? I swear I've seen the BSOD itself telling me that it is currently writing the dump file to disk, with a counter.
What's happening is that the BSOD overwrites the pagefile with the full contents of memory in order to avoid doing any complicated processing after a critical system error (bear in mind that the cause of the BSOD could have damaged any heaps, code, unloaded drivers etc, so the BSOD basically can't rely on anything). When the system reboots it discovers that the pagefile's been marked as a BSOD, and then sets about converting the RAW dump to a minidump file that can be analysed either by Microsoft's crash-reporting server or by a driver developer analysing the crash dump in WinDbg or Visual Studio.
While I don't know for sure, its possible that it has to write RAM to disk while displaying the screen, but when it reboots, it pulls the rest of the process memory space out of the swap file to create the full core dump.
This is the first time I hear something like that. I though the dump was always writting while the BSOD is shown. You can try to connect the kernel debugger in verbose mode and figure out what's happening.
I am trying to run an app which is using a kernel mode driver. System locks up every hour and the only way to recover it is a hard reset. Sysrq stops responding, telnet sessions hang and there are no error messages of any kind. Unfortunately the board does not have ejtag support. I have been trying to isolate it functionally, but this is like looking for a needle in a hay stack. Any suggestions?
PS: This is a mips linux system (2.6.31).
Here are some options, depending on the specifics on your situation. If you can provide more detail about the platform and nature of the kernel mode driver it would be helpful.
Assuming you have reason to be confident in the hardware, your likely sources of lockups are locking problems in the kernel, uninitialized variables, and infinite loops with preemption disabled.
Can you configure a timer interrupt to run periodically and blink a LED? You might find it useful to see if interrupts continue to be handled while in a lockup.
Enable soft lockup detection in the Linux kernel hacking menu, and any other relevant kernel hacking features. It may take Linux a minute or two detect and report a soft lockup. Have you waited long enough to check for this?
Enable lock dependency checking in kernel hacking, and fix any reported locking errors in your driver.
Try changing the kernel preemption mode. This changes the behaviour of some system locks, in some cases turning deadlocks into less harmful locks. If it's relevant/possible, disable SMP.
Unfortunately without sysreq operating, or some way of poking the underlying system, you are out of luck.
If you can get some behavior out of the system (perhaps a hardware watchdog?), I would recommend kdump.
Furthermore, if this is a more recent problem, start by bisecting the code of the driver to determine where the crash is occurring.
If the kernel isn't totally hung and you are still getting interrupts, you might be able to use KGDB.
If you can't do that, you could add more logging code to your driver to track down the source of the problem. I'd put a printk() on every function's entry at a minimum and probably on every exit of each function as well. That should at least help you find out where the problem is happening.
How does one programmatically cause the OS to switch off, go away and stop doing anything at all so that a program may have complete control of a PC system?
I'm interested in doing this from both an MS Windows and Linux environments. Any languages or APIs considered.
I want the OS to stop preempting my program, stop its virtual memory management, stop its device drivers and interrupt service routines from running and basically just go away. Then, when my program has had its evil way with the bare metal, I want the OS to come back again without a reboot.
Is this even possible?
With Linux, you could use kexec jump to transfer control completely to another kernel (ie, your program). Of course, with great power comes great responsibility - it is entirely up to you to service interrupts, and avoid corrupting the old kernel's memory. You'll end up having to write your own OS kernel to do this. Also, the transfer of control takes quite some time, as the kernel has to de-initialize all hardware, then reinitialize it when it's time to resume. Since kexec jump was originally designed for hibernation support, this isn't a problem in its original context, but depending on what you're doing, it might be a problem.
You may want to consider instead working within the framework given to you by the OS - just write a normal driver for whatever you're doing.
Finally, one more option would be using the linux Real-Time patchset. This lets you assign static priorities to everything, even interrupt handlers; by running a process with higher priority than anything else, you could suspend /nearly/ everything - the system will still service a small stub for interrupts, as well as certain interrupts that can't be deferred, like timing interrupts, but for the most part the heavy work will be deferred until you relinquish control of the CPU.
Note that the RT patchset won't stop virtual memory and the like - mlockall will prevent page faults on valid pages though, if that's enough for you.
Also, keep in mind that whatever you do, the system BIOS can still cause SMM traps, which cannot be disabled, except by motherboard-model-specific methods.
There are lots of really ugly ways to do this. You could modify the running kernel by writing some trampoline code to /dev/kmem that passes control to your application. But I wouldn't recommend attempting something like that!
Basically, you would need to have your application act as its own operating system. If you want to read data from a file, you would have to figure out where the data lives on disk, and generate your own SCSI requests to talk to the disk drive. You would have to implement your own interrupt handler to get notified when the data is ready. Likewise you would have to handle page faults, memory allocation, etc. Most users feel that this isn't worth the effort...
Why do you want to do this?
Is there something that your application needs to do that the OS won't let it do? Are you concerned with the OS impact on performance? Something else?
If you don't mind shelling out some cash, you could use IntervalZero's RTX to do this for a Windows system. It's a hard realtime subsystem that gets installed on a Windows box as sort of a hack into the HAL and takes over the machine, letting Windows have whatever CPU cycles are left over.
It has its own scheduler and device drivers, but if you run your program at the top RTX priority, don't install any RTX device drivers (or disable interrupts for the duration), then nothing will interrupt it.
It also supports a small amount of interaction with programs on the Windows side.
We use it as a nice way to get a hard realtime box that runs Windows.
coLinux loads CoLinuxDriver into the NT kernel or a colinux.ko into the Linux kernel. It does exactly what you asked – it "unschedules" the host OS, and runs its own code, with its own memory management, interrupts, etc. Then, when it's done, it "reschedules" the host OS, allowing it to continue from where it left off. coLinux uses this to run a modified Linux kernel parallel to the host OS.
Unlike more common virtualization techniques, there are no barriers between coLinux and the bare metal hardware at all. However, hardware and the host OS tend to get confused if the coLinux guest touches anything without restoring it before returning to the host OS.
Not really. Operating Systems are a foundation, and your program runs on top of them. The OS handles memory access, disk writing operations, communications, etc. when your application makes requests, and asking the OS to move out of the way would mean that your program would have to do the OS's job instead.
Not as such, no.
What you want is basically an application that becomes an OS; a severely stripped down Linux kernel coupled with some highly customized and minimized tools might be the way to go for this.
if you were devious, and wanted to avoid alot of the operating system housekeeping you could probably hook yourself into a driver routine. Thinking out aloud, verging on hacking. google how to write root kits.
Yeah dude, you can totally do that, you can also write a program to tell my bank to give you all my money and send you a hot Russian.