Re: [PATCH RFC] virtio_balloon: conservative balloon page shrinking

From: David Hildenbrand
Date: Thu Feb 06 2020 - 04:32:38 EST


On 06.02.20 10:28, Wang, Wei W wrote:
> On Thursday, February 6, 2020 5:10 PM, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>> so dropping caches (echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches) will no longer
>> deflate the balloon when conservative_shrinker=true?
>>
>
> Should be. Need Tyler's help to test it.
>

If the page cache is empty, a drop_slab() will deflate the whole balloon
if I am not wrong.

Especially, a echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

will first drop the page cache and then drop_slab()

While I like the general idea, it looks more like a hack to me, to try
to teach the shrinker something it was not built for/does not support yet.

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb