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Re:IBM mainframe beats other platforms for cost and performance by jfindley on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @11:10AM (#28458233)
If by "samepage merging" you mean KSM[0], it's hugely expensive in CPU cycles (not to mention severe impacts on membw, l3 cache, etc) and outside of low-end VPS hosting has relatively few real-world applications. I'm not sure why it would be a useful thing to mention here.

0: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/mm/ksm.ht...

Re:IBM mainframe beats other platforms for cost and performance by evol262 on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @11:21AM (#28458410)
Yes, I mean KSM (and its equivalents in other hypervisors).

The CPU cycles are a non-issue for the configuration on this mainframe, and it's fair to assume that, since IBM developed the silicon and IBM engineers wrote the hypervisor layer, that most of the detrimental effects of "we need this to work across multiple CPU vendors and multiple generations of the architecture" are covered.

Even x86 CPUs get improvements to cache coherency in memory dedupe scenarios with generational improvement, and intelligent NUMA topology layout helps a lot. It's also worth noting that it's a mainframe, so essentially every configuration has a large number of other processors with a couple of instructions disabled so they don't "count" as CPUs for licensing, but they still perform work. I would not be surprised in the least if there were 1+ co-processors dedicated to offloading operations exactly like "LPAR || z/VM memory dedupe"

Re:IBM mainframe beats other platforms for cost and performance by pgtan on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @01:33PM (#28460389)
[edit] sorry, I've mistaken the concepts. The name is active memory deduplication, which sits on top on memory sharing.

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4827.pdf

[old]

It is called active memory sharing in the POWER world

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/power9/9080-M9S?topic=sharing-ma...

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4470.pdf

Re:IBM mainframe beats other platforms for cost and performance by jfindley on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @11:39AM (#28458691)
That's a good point - I was speaking from experience with KSM on x86, but having a dedicated coprocessor on system Z for this application would make a lot of sense and fix many of the problems I've seen on x86.
Re:IBM mainframe beats other platforms for cost and performance by eptcyka on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @11:25AM (#28458476)
This isn't something to be done at the guest VM level but at the hypervisor level. In an optimal scenario, it can be cheaper to clone a VM with CoW semantics than it would be to deduplicate memory dynamically. But I guess this would defeat kASLR between all of the clones.