From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752105Ab0CSUqn (ORCPT ); Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:46:43 -0400 Received: from smtp-outbound-1.vmware.com ([65.115.85.69]:33905 "EHLO smtp-outbound-1.vmware.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751341Ab0CSUqm (ORCPT ); Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:46:42 -0400 From: Dmitry Torokhov Subject: [RFC/PATCH 0/4] VMware balloon driver over virtio To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Cc: pv-drivers@vmware.com, Alok Kataria , Saileshkumar Jain , Rusty Russell Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:46:41 -0700 Message-ID: <20100319204628.4418.84674.stgit@localhost.localdomain> User-Agent: StGIT/0.14.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi, VMware would like to get its Linux balloon driver merged into mainline and is considering doing it within virtio framework. The following is the initial implementation of our ballooning interface as a virtio device. It allows our hypervisor to work in tandem with virtio_balloon driver and inflate and deflate balloon on demand. Due to the fact that our monitor works a bit differently from KVM some changes are needed in virtio_balloon itself, namely: - our hypervisor may refuse locking certain pages. This may happen, for example, when target balloon size is changed since guest polled it last time. We expect guest to try locking different page and release refused pages once target balloon size is reached. - our hypervisor may, in certain situations, reset the balloon. In this case it expects guest to quickly release all memory allocated by by the balloon but to not bother telling the host about pages being released. There are more differences (adaptive allocation rates, sleeping allocations) which we intend to address at a later date if it is decided that virtio is the proper subsystem to be used for our driver. Thanks! -- Dmitry