Initializing a computing system using dormant pages includes marking a set of guest physical addresses as dormant. It further includes, for each node in a plurality of physical nodes, designating a set of real physical addresses for zeroing. An operating system is executing collectively across the physical nodes.
1. A computer system, comprising:
a plurality of physically interconnected computing nodes, wherein a guest operating system is run on a virtual environment that is defined by a set of hyper-kernels running on the plurality of physically interconnected computing nodes;
wherein a guest physical address is marked as dormant, and wherein the guest physical address is owned by a first computing node; and
wherein the guest physical address is migrated from the first computing node to a second computing node, and wherein migrating the guest physical address comprises transmitting a message indicating that the guest physical address is dormant.
2. The computer system of claim 1 , wherein the guest physical address is indicated to be dormant based at least in part on a dormant bit associated with the guest physical address being set.
3. The computer system of claim 1 , wherein the dormant bit is included in a page table, and wherein the page table includes metadata information associated with guest physical addresses.
4. The computer system of claim 1 , wherein the guest physical address is marked as dormant in response to detecting that a page of physical memory mapped to the guest physical address comprises a page of zeroes.
5. The computer system of claim 1 , wherein the guest physical address is marked as dormant in response to detecting that the guest physical address has requested a page of physical memory mapped to the guest physical address.
6. The computer system of claim 1 , wherein contents of a page of physical memory mapped to the guest physical address marked as dormant are not transmitted.
7. A method, comprising:
marking a guest physical address as dormant, wherein the guest physical address is owned by a first computing node, wherein the first computing node is included in a plurality of physically interconnected computing nodes, and wherein a guest operating system is run on a virtual environment that is defined by a set of hyper-kernels running on the plurality of physically interconnected computing nodes; and
migrating the guest physical address from the first computing node to a second computing node, wherein migrating the guest physical address comprises transmitting a message indicating that the guest physical address is dormant.
8. The method of claim 7 , wherein the guest physical address is indicated to be dormant based at least in part on a dormant bit associated with the guest physical address being set.
9. The method of claim 7 , wherein the dormant bit is included in a page table, and wherein the page table includes metadata information associated with guest physical addresses.
10. The method of claim 7 , wherein the guest physical address is marked as dormant in response to detecting that a page of physical memory mapped to the guest physical address comprises a page of zeroes.
11. The method of claim 7 , wherein the guest physical address is marked as dormant in response to detecting that the guest physical address has requested a page of physical memory mapped to the guest physical address.
12. The method of claim 7 , wherein contents of a page of physical memory mapped to the guest physical address marked as dormant are not transmitted.