Re: [PATCH v1 00/11] KVM: s390: pv: implement lazy destroy

Cornelia Huck
2021-05-18T15:52:40Z

On Tue, 18 May 2021 17:45:18 +0200
Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com> wrote:

> On 18.05.21 17:36, Claudio Imbrenda wrote:
> > On Tue, 18 May 2021 17:05:37 +0200
> > Cornelia Huck <cohuck@redhat.com> wrote:

> >> Can too many not-yet-cleaned-up pages lead to a (temporary) memory
> >> exhaustion?
> >
> > in case of reboot, not much; the pages were in use are still in use
> > after the reboot, and they can be swapped.
> >
> > in case of a shutdown, yes, because the pages are really taken aside
> > and cleared/destroyed in background. they cannot be swapped. they are
> > freed immediately as they are processed, to try to mitigate memory
> > exhaustion scenarios.
> >
> > in the end, this patchseries is a tradeoff between speed and memory
> > consumption. the memory needs to be cleared up at some point, and that
> > requires time.
> >
> > in cases where this might be an issue, I introduced a new KVM flag to
> > disable lazy destroy (patch 10)
>
> Maybe we could piggy-back on the OOM-kill notifier and then fall back to
> synchronous freeing for some pages?

Sounds like a good idea. If delayed cleanup is safe, you probably want
to have the fast shutdown behaviour.