Re: [PATCH] xen/balloon: add late_initcall_sync() for initial ballooning done

From: Juergen Gross
Date: Fri Oct 29 2021 - 00:49:07 EST


On 28.10.21 22:16, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 12:59:52PM +0200, Juergen Gross wrote:
When running as PVH or HVM guest with actual memory < max memory the
hypervisor is using "populate on demand" in order to allow the guest
to balloon down from its maximum memory size. For this to work
correctly the guest must not touch more memory pages than its target
memory size as otherwise the PoD cache will be exhausted and the guest
is crashed as a result of that.

In extreme cases ballooning down might not be finished today before
the init process is started, which can consume lots of memory.

In order to avoid random boot crashes in such cases, add a late init
call to wait for ballooning down having finished for PVH/HVM guests.

Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reported-by: Marek Marczykowski-Górecki <marmarek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Juergen Gross <jgross@xxxxxxxx>

It may happen that initial balloon down fails (state==BP_ECANCELED). In
that case, it waits indefinitely. I think it should rather report a
failure (and panic? it's similar to OOM before PID 1 starts, so rather
hard to recover), instead of hanging.

Okay, I can add something like that. I'm thinking of issuing a failure
message in case of credit not having changed for 1 minute and panic()
after two more minutes. Is this fine?


Juergen

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