Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] virtio_balloon: submit reported pages as individual buffers

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2026 at 02:26:33AM -0700, Ruben Hakobyan wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 26, 2026 at 11:53 PM Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > The virtio_balloon driver reports a scatter-gather list of free pages
> > to the VMM so it may discard unused pages.
> >
> > For an arm64 kernel with 64 KiB pages, the default reporting and
> > allocation orders allow entries ranging from 2 MiB to 512 MiB. If the
> > report contains a sufficient number of large entries, we will end up
> > with a descriptor chain that represents over 4 GiB of memory. This
> > violates virtio spec, which says:
> >         Drivers MUST NOT add a descriptor chain longer than $2^{32}$ bytes in total;
> >
> > Specifically, submitting $2^{32}$ or more breaks Rust-VMM.
> >
> > Submit each reported page as a separate virtqueue buffer instead of one
> > buffer with an sg list of all pages.  This also avoids indirect
> > descriptor allocation (kmalloc in the reporting path).
> >
> > To avoid multiple buffers causing interrupt storms, keep callbacks
> > disabled while we wait for an event.
> >
> > TODO: as an alternative, keep using virtqueue_enable_cb_delayed
> > but add buffers after there's space in the ring.
> >
> > Note: if the virtqueue is broken, wait_event on
> > virtqueue_get_buf hangs.  This is a pre-existing issue:
> > the old single-buffer code had the same hang.
> >
> > Reported-by: Ruben Hakobyan <hruben@xxxxxxxx>
> > Cc: Ruben Hakobyan <hruben@xxxxxxxx>
> > Fixes: b0c504f15471 ("virtio-balloon: add support for providing free page reports to host")
> > Cc: Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > ---
> >
> > Notes (changelog):
> >     changes since v1:
> >         keep callbacks disabled while draining: get_buf re-arms the used
> >         event for the next buffer, reintroducing an interrupt per page.
> >         Disable the reporting vq callbacks at probe, and only arm the
> >         delayed callback to wait.
> >
> 
> Thanks for the patches! I think sashiko-bot found some issues on broken
> queues in the first patch that are worth looking into for correctness.

Surprise removal of the balloon? Nope, it's a pre-existing issue that
it's broken.  Besides it's not really practical, no one removes
the balloon - no need.

> Other than that, I tested the "normal path" on QEMU and Cloud Hypervisor,
> both on 4 KiB and 64 KiB guests, and this works correctly.

Thanks a lot! Can you pls confirm whether the performance is about the
same/better/worse?

-- 
MST