Balázs Pozsár's questions

I have been testing network throughput and latency and I was wondering if my measurements are as expected. For the test, I used Fedora 17 for both host and guest, using kernel 3.5.2-3.fc17.86_64.

Pinging an external server on the LAN from the host, using a gigabit interface, the results are:

# ping -c 10 172.16.1.1
PING 172.16.1.1 (172.16.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.109 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.131 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.145 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=4 ttl=64 time=0.116 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=5 ttl=64 time=0.110 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=6 ttl=64 time=0.114 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=7 ttl=64 time=0.112 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=8 ttl=64 time=0.117 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=9 ttl=64 time=0.119 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=10 ttl=64 time=0.128 ms

--- 172.16.1.1 ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 8999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.109/0.120/0.145/0.011 ms

Pinging the same external host on the LAN from the guest, the latency seems to be much higher:

# ping -c 10 172.16.1.1
PING 172.16.1.1 (172.16.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.206 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.352 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.518 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=4 ttl=64 time=0.351 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=5 ttl=64 time=0.543 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=6 ttl=64 time=0.387 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=7 ttl=64 time=0.348 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=8 ttl=64 time=0.364 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=9 ttl=64 time=0.345 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.1.1: icmp_req=10 ttl=64 time=0.334 ms

--- 172.16.1.1 ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 8999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.206/0.374/0.543/0.093 ms

(The LAN, the host and guest are idle otherwise during the tests.)

The vhost_net and macvtap modules are loaded on the host, and qemu was started (by libvirtd) with the -netdev vhost=on option.

Is this expected and normal, or do others see better latencies? Can I try anything to make it better? What latencies do others see?

I have been struggling with this not easily reproducible issue since a while. I am using linux kernel v3.1.0, and sometimes routing to a few IP addresses does not work. What seems to happen is that instead of sending the packet to the gateway, the kernel treats the destination address as local, and tries to gets its MAC address via ARP.

For example, now my current IP address is 172.16.1.104/24, the gateway is 172.16.1.254:

# ifconfig eth0 eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1B:63:97:FC:DC
          inet addr:172.16.1.104  Bcast:172.16.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:230772 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:171013 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:191879370 (182.9 Mb)  TX bytes:47173253 (44.9 Mb)
          Interrupt:17

# route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
0.0.0.0         172.16.1.254    0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0
172.16.1.0      0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     1      0        0 eth0

I can ping a few addresses, but not 172.16.0.59:

# ping -c1 172.16.1.254
PING 172.16.1.254 (172.16.1.254) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.16.1.254: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.383 ms

--- 172.16.1.254 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.383/0.383/0.383/0.000 ms
root@pozsybook:~# ping -c1 172.16.0.1
PING 172.16.0.1 (172.16.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.16.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=63 time=5.54 ms

--- 172.16.0.1 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 5.545/5.545/5.545/0.000 ms
root@pozsybook:~# ping -c1 172.16.0.2
PING 172.16.0.2 (172.16.0.2) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.16.0.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=62 time=7.92 ms

--- 172.16.0.2 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.925/7.925/7.925/0.000 ms
root@pozsybook:~# ping -c1 172.16.0.59
PING 172.16.0.59 (172.16.0.59) 56(84) bytes of data.
From 172.16.1.104 icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable

--- 172.16.0.59 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 0 received, +1 errors, 100% packet loss, time 0ms

When trying to ping 172.16.0.59, I can see in tcpdump that an ARP req was sent:

# tcpdump -n -i eth0|grep ARP
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
15:25:16.671217 ARP, Request who-has 172.16.0.59 tell 172.16.1.104, length 28

and /proc/net/arp has an incomplete entry for 172.16.0.59:

# grep 172.16.0.59 /proc/net/arp
172.16.0.59      0x1         0x0         00:00:00:00:00:00     *        eth0

Please note, that 172.16.0.59 is accessible from this LAN from other computers.

Does anyone have any idea of what's going on? Thanks.

update: replies to the comments below:

• there are no interfaces besides eth0 and lo
• the ARP req cannot be seen on the other end, but that's how it should work. the main problem is that an ARP req should not even be sent at the first place
• the problem persist even if I add an explicit route with the command "route add -host 172.16.0.59 gw 172.16.1.254 dev eth0"

I have a hdd with windows 7 installed on it. I would like to move (or clone) the whole system to another (in this case smaller) hdd. What is the best and easiest way to do it? Basically I would need some kind of copy operation which would handle the differenct hdd sizes and copy everything including the boot loader. What method do you recommend?

I have a windows server 2003 with a few printers, and once in a while the Print Spooler service crashes with this message in the event viewer: Faulting application spoolsv.exe, version 5.2.3790.0, faulting module ZSR.DLL, version 6.20.1625.0, fault address 0x0001f979. Obviously it would be nice to prevent this entirely, but until then, I would like it restart automatically. I have set it to "Restart the Service" on the First/Second/Subsequent Failures on the Properties/Recovery tab, but it does not restart. I can manually start it, and then it works fine. How could I set it to restart automatically?