Re: [PATCH v7 kernel 3/5] virtio-balloon: implementation of VIRTIO_BALLOON_F_CHUNK_TRANSFER

From: Wei Wang
Date: Sat Mar 11 2017 - 06:58:33 EST


On 03/11/2017 01:11 AM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 05:58:28PM +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
One of the issues of current balloon is the 4k page size
assumption. For example if you free a huge page you
have to split it up and pass 4k chunks to host.
Quite often host can't free these 4k chunks at all (e.g.
when it's using huge tlb fs).
It's even sillier for architectures with base page size >4k.
I completely agree with you that we should be able to pass a hugepage
as a single chunk. Also we shouldn't assume that host and guest have
the same page size. I think we can come up with a scheme that actually
lets us encode that into a 64-bit word, something like this:

bit 0 clear => bits 1-11 encode a page count, bits 12-63 encode a PFN, page size 4k.
bit 0 set, bit 1 clear => bits 2-12 encode a page count, bits 13-63 encode a PFN, page size 8k
bits 0+1 set, bit 2 clear => bits 3-13 for page count, bits 14-63 for PFN, page size 16k.
bits 0-2 set, bit 3 clear => bits 4-14 for page count, bits 15-63 for PFN, page size 32k
bits 0-3 set, bit 4 clear => bits 5-15 for page count, bits 16-63 for PFN, page size 64k

That means we can always pass 2048 pages (of whatever page size) in a single chunk. And
we support arbitrary power of two page sizes. I suggest something like this:

u64 page_to_chunk(struct page *page)
{
u64 chunk = page_to_pfn(page) << PAGE_SHIFT;
chunk |= (1UL << compound_order(page)) - 1;
}

(note this is a single page of order N, so we leave the page count bits
set to 0, meaning one page).


I'm thinking what if the guest needs to transfer these much physically continuous
memory to host: 1GB+2MB+64KB+32KB+16KB+4KB.
Is it going to use Six 64-bit chunks? Would it be simpler if we just
use the 128-bit chunk format (we can drop the previous normal 64-bit format)?

Best,
Wei