Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH kernel v5 0/5] Extend virtio-balloon for fast (de)inflating & fast live migration

[Dave Hansen]

On 12/15/2016 04:48 PM, Li, Liang Z wrote:
>>> It seems we leave too many bit  for the pfn, and the bits leave for
>>> length is not enough, How about keep 45 bits for the pfn and 19 bits
>>> for length, 45 bits for pfn can cover 57 bits physical address, that should be
>> enough in the near feature.
>>> What's your opinion?
>> I still think 'order' makes a lot of sense.  But, as you say, 57 bits is enough for
>> x86 for a while.  Other architectures.... who knows?

Thinking about this some more...  There are really only two cases that
matter: 4k pages and "much bigger" ones.

Squeezing each 4k page into 8 bytes of metadata helps guarantee that
this scheme won't regress over the old scheme in any cases.  For bigger
ranges, 8 vs 16 bytes means *nothing*.  And 16 bytes will be as good or
better than the old scheme for everything which is >4k.

How about this:
 * 52 bits of 'pfn', 5 bits of 'order', 7 bits of 'length'
 * One special 'length' value to mean "actual length in next 8 bytes"

That should be pretty simple to produce and decode.  We have two record
sizes, but I think it is manageable.