Re: [PATCH RFC 2/6] mm: convert PG_balloon to PG_offline

David Hildenbrand
2018-11-14T22:49:15Z

On 14.11.18 23:23, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 10:17:00PM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>> Rename PG_balloon to PG_offline. This is an indicator that the page is
>> logically offline, the content stale and that it should not be touched
>> (e.g. a hypervisor would have to allocate backing storage in order for the
>> guest to dump an unused page). We can then e.g. exclude such pages from
>> dumps.
>>
>> In following patches, we will make use of this bit also in other balloon
>> drivers. While at it, document PGTABLE.
>
> Thank you for documenting PGTABLE. I didn't realise I also had this
> document to update when I added PGTABLE.

Thank you for looking into this :)

>
>> +++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/pagemap.rst
>> @@ -78,6 +78,8 @@ number of times a page is mapped.
>> 23. BALLOON
>> 24. ZERO_PAGE
>> 25. IDLE
>> + 26. PGTABLE
>> + 27. OFFLINE
>
> So the offline *user* bit is new ... even though the *kernel* bit
> just renames the balloon bit. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
> I'm going to think about it some more. Could you share your decision
> process with us?

BALLOON was/is documented as

"23 - BALLOON
balloon compaction page
"

and only includes all virtio-ballon pages after the non-lru migration
feature has been implemented for ballooned pages. Since then, this flag
does basically no longer stands for what it actually was supposed to do.

To not break uapi I decided to not rename it but instead to add a new flag.

>
> I have no objection to renaming the balloon bit inside the kernel; I
> think that's a wise idea. I'm just not sure whether we should rename
> the user balloon bit rather than adding a new bit.
>

Can we rename without breaking uapi?

--

Thanks,

David / dhildenb