Re: [PATCH] VMware Balloon driver

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge]

On 04/06/2010 11:36 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
> On 04/06/2010 09:25 PM, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> > On 04/06/2010 09:32 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > > Yeah.  If we wanted commonality, we could make a balloon_core.c that 
> > > contains the common code.  IMO that's premature, but perhaps there's 
> > > some meat there (like suspend/resume support and /proc//sys interface).
> >
> > I think it would be useful to have common:
> >
> >   1. User and kernel mode ABIs for controlling ballooning.  It assumes
> >      that the different balloon implementations are sufficiently
> >      similar in semantics.   (Once there's a kernel ABI, adding a
> >      common user ABI is trivial.)
> >   2. Policy driving the ballooning driver, at least from the guest
> >      side.  That is, some good metrics from the vm subsystem about
> >      memory pressure (both positive and negative), and something to
> >      turn those metrics into requests to the balloon driver.
> >
> > 1) is not a huge amount of code, but something consistent would be 
> > nice.  2) is something we've been missing and is a bit of an open 
> > question/research project anyway.
>
> 3) Code that attempts to reclaim 2MB pages when possible

Yes.  Ballooning in 4k units is a bit silly.

    J

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