Re: [RFC PATCH 3/4] kvm: Add guest side support for free memory hints

Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-02-11T17:58:20Z

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 09:48:11AM -0800, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On 2/9/19 4:49 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 04, 2019 at 10:15:52AM -0800, Alexander Duyck wrote:
> >> From: Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@linux.intel.com>
> >>
> >> Add guest support for providing free memory hints to the KVM hypervisor for
> >> freed pages huge TLB size or larger. I am restricting the size to
> >> huge TLB order and larger because the hypercalls are too expensive to be
> >> performing one per 4K page.
> > Even 2M pages start to get expensive with a TB guest.
>
> Yeah, but we don't allocate and free TB's of memory at a high frequency.
>
> > Really it seems we want a virtio ring so we can pass a batch of these.
> > E.g. 256 entries, 2M each - that's more like it.
>
> That only makes sense for a system that's doing high-frequency,
> discontiguous frees of 2M pages. Right now, a 2M free/realloc cycle
> (THP or hugetlb) is *not* super-high frequency just because of the
> latency for zeroing the page.

Heh but with a ton of free memory, and a thread zeroing some of
it out in the background, will this still be the case?
It could be that we'll be able to find clean pages
at all times.

> A virtio ring seems like an overblown solution to a non-existent problem.

It would be nice to see some traces to help us decide one way or the other.

--
MST