Re: RFC [PATCH v4 2/7] Enable balloon drivers to report inflated memory

[Alexander Atanasov]

On 14.10.22 16:01, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 14.10.22 14:50, Alexander Atanasov wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > On 11.10.22 12:23, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > > > > > > Sounds to me that all you want is some notifier to be called from
> > > > > > > adjust_managed_page_count(). What am I missing?
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Notifier will act as an accumulator to report size of change and it
> > > > > > will make things easier for the drivers and users wrt locking.
> > > > > > Notifier is similar to the memory hotplug notifier.
> > > > >
> > > > > Overall, I am not convinced that there is any value of separating the
> > > > > value
> > > > > and the notifier. You can batch both or not batch both. In addition,
> > > > > as I
> > > > > mentioned, having two values seems racy.
> > > >
> > > > I have identified two users so far above - may be more to come.
> > > > One type needs the value to adjust. Also having the value is necessary
> > > > to report it to users and oom. There are options with callbacks and so
> > > > on but it will complicate things with no real gain. You are right about
> > > > the atomicity but i guess if that's a problem for some user it could
> > > > find a way to ensure it. i am yet to find such place.
> > >
> > > I haven't followed the whole discussion, but I just wanted to raise that
> > > having a generic mechanism to notify on such changes could be valuable.
> > >
> > > For example, virtio-mem also uses adjust_managed_page_count() and might
> > > sometimes not trigger memory hotplug notifiers when adding more memory
> > > (essentially, when it fake-adds memory part of an already added Linux
> > > memory block).
> > >
> > > What might make sense is schedule some kind of deferred notification on
> > > adjust_managed_page_count() changes. This way, we could notify without
> > > caring about locking and would naturally batch notifications.
> > >
> > > adjust_managed_page_count() users would not require changes.
> >
> > Making it deferred will bring issues for both the users of the
> > adjust_managed_page_count and the receivers of the notification -
> > locking as first. And it is hard to know when the adjustment will
> > finish, some of the drivers wait and retry in blocks. It will bring
> > complexity and it will not be possible to convert users in small steps.
>
> What exactly is the issue about handling that deferred? Who needs an 
> immediate, 100% precise notification? >
> Locking from a separate workqueue shouldn't be too hard, or what am i 
> missing?

We do not need immediate but most of the current callers of 
adjust_managed_page_count work in +1/-1 updates - so we want to defer 
the notification until they are done with changes. Deferring to a wq is 
not the problem, it would need to be done most likely.


> > Other problem is that there are drivers that do not use
> > adjust_managed_page_count().
>
> Which ones? Do we care?

VMWare and Virtio balloon drivers. I recently proposed to unify them and 
the objection was that it would break existing users - which is valid so 
we must care i guess.

--
Regards,
Alexander Atanasov