Re: Balloon driver for Linux/HVM

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>]

On 11/22/2010 01:51 AM, Daniel Kiper wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 12:32:35PM -0800, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
>> What is the difference between 2.6.36 balloon driver and Jeremy's
>> xen/balloon tree head?  I think ideally the kernel version for
>> development should be the latest (2.6.36).
> I know that the best practice is to base new work on the
> latest stable kernel version, however I am not sure that it is
> the case there. xen/balloon head contains most of neweset fixes
> and improvments which are not merged into current stable till
> now. That is why I think we should start from this and later
> merge it with current stable. However, maybe Jeremy may have
> better view of which version would be better for the start
> of development.
>

The big difference between xen/balloon and current mainline is hugepage
support, which is not yet in an upstreamable state.  Aside from that,
current upstream balloon driver (in current git, post 2.6.37-rc3) is
equivalent, and would make a good base for development.

The main difference between .37-rc and .36 is support for boot-time
ballooning, but the changes to the balloon driver to support that are
small, so .36 would probably make a reasonable base as well.

    J