Re: [FYI] DAMON and virtio-balloon in DeepSeek's DSec paper

[Lian Wang <lianux.mm@gmail.com>]

Hi David,

Indeed, both directions are very exciting. virtio-pmem avoids duplicated
page-cache residency, while DAMON with free-page reporting provides a
practical path to reclaim cold guest memory and return it to the host.

This connects closely with the work we are already doing. We are continuing
to improve our DAMON-based experiments, and we would also like to explore how
DAMON-based memory reclamation can be coordinated with broader CPU and
resource monitoring.

At LPC, I plan to bring detailed data and discuss the follow-up design with
everyone. I hope we can turn this into an executable milestone, bring the
related ideas together, and try more scenarios as a community. Everything
looks very encouraging and gives us much to look forward to. With SJ helping
coordinate the broader roadmap and everyone contributing, I am confident that
we will achieve many more exciting results. Kernel work like this can continue
making the world better.

Thanks,
Lian

On Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:04:41 +0200 "David Hildenbrand (Arm)" <david@kernel.org> wrote:

> Free-page reporting makes much more sense.
>
> When I was at RH we were looking at this issue as well. virtio-pmem was one
> way of avoiding the page cache in VM entirely. But it has its own limitations.