ksmd - what is expected behavior?

[Mark McLoughlin]

Hi Tom,

On Tue, 2009-10-27 at 08:58 -0700, Tom London wrote:
> I'm running Rawhide with a qemu-kvm VM that runs WinXP.
> 
> I'm noticing 'ksmd' running at a constant 15-25% of my cpu, for example:
> 
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>    32 root      25   5     0    0    0 S 21.2  0.0   2:06.75 ksmd
>  2265 tbl       20   0 1227m 530m 8256 R 17.2 13.5   3:09.05 qemu-kvm
>  1599 root      20   0  220m  42m  17m S  5.3  1.1   0:55.02 Xorg
>  2203 tbl       20   0 1234m  62m  24m S  5.0  1.6   0:28.93 rhythmbox
> 
> Checking, I see that "ksmd" is running, but "ksmtuned" is not.
> 
> System is Thinkpad X200 with 4GB RAM.  VM image is configured at 512MB.
> 
> Is this "to be expected" behavior?

We're just discussing something similar on the fedora-virt list

Currently, ksm is enabled by default in the kernel - since it's disabled
by default in 2.6.32, we'll probably switch to that behaviour

Do you have the ksm or ksmtuned init scripts enabled? Does enabling
ksmtuned help reduce the CPU usage?

Cheers,
Mark.