Re: Balloons, crash-dumps, populate-on-demand, and shared zero pages

[Paul Durrant <paul.durrant@citrix.com>]

Steven Smith wrote:
> That would make things marginally easier on the drivers, but it's at
> the expense of potentially more subtle errors when something goes
> wrong.  At the moment, if the balloon driver tries to deflate the
> balloon too far, the populate hypercall fails and it's very obvious
> what's gone wrong, whereas with an implicit re-populate it'll look
> like everything's working fine for some time afterwards, until the
> guest touches too many pages and PoD kills it.
> 

If the balloon driver deflated too far, that would be a bug in the 
balloon driver, and if Windows doesn't scrub the memory when it's freed 
we could do that ourselves so at least PoD would kill the guest at the 
right juncture.

   Paul

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Paul Durrant, Software Engineer

Citrix Systems (R&D) Ltd.
First Floor, Building 101
Cambridge Science Park
Milton Road
Cambridge CB4 0FY
United Kingdom

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