From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:48789) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1YdFCS-0002Gw-Eq for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 01 Apr 2015 05:44:41 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1YdFCO-0008VL-O2 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 01 Apr 2015 05:44:40 -0400 Received: from bedivere.hansenpartnership.com ([66.63.167.143]:51415) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1YdFCO-0008RM-9T for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 01 Apr 2015 05:44:36 -0400 Message-ID: <1427881468.3559.33.camel@HansenPartnership.com> From: James Bottomley Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2015 12:44:28 +0300 In-Reply-To: <1425020265-25939-3-git-send-email-den@openvz.org> References: <1425020265-25939-1-git-send-email-den@openvz.org> <1425020265-25939-3-git-send-email-den@openvz.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/2] balloon: add a feature bit to let Guest OS deflate balloon on oom List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: "Denis V. Lunev" Cc: "Michael S. Tsirkin" , qemu-devel@nongnu.org, Raushaniya Maksudova , Anthony Liguori On Fri, 2015-02-27 at 09:57 +0300, Denis V. Lunev wrote: > Excessive virtio_balloon inflation can cause invocation of OOM-killer, > when Linux is under severe memory pressure. Various mechanisms are > responsible for correct virtio_balloon memory management. Nevertheless it > is often the case that these control tools does not have enough time to > react on fast changing memory load. As a result OS runs out of memory and > invokes OOM-killer. The balancing of memory by use of the virtio balloon > should not cause the termination of processes while there are pages in the > balloon. Now there is no way for virtio balloon driver to free memory at > the last moment before some process get killed by OOM-killer. > > This does not provide a security breach as balloon itself is running > inside Guest OS and is working in the cooperation with the host. Thus > some improvements from Guest side should be considered as normal. > > To solve the problem, introduce a virtio_balloon callback which is > expected to be called from the oom notifier call chain in out_of_memory() > function. If virtio balloon could release some memory, it will make the > system return and retry the allocation that forced the out of memory > killer to run. > > This behavior should be enabled if and only if appropriate feature bit > is set on the device. It is off by default. > > This functionality was recently merged into vanilla Linux. > > commit 5a10b7dbf904bfe01bb9fcc6298f7df09eed77d5 > Author: Raushaniya Maksudova > Date: Mon Nov 10 09:36:29 2014 +1030 > > This patch adds respective control bits into QEMU. It introduces > deflate-on-oom option for balloon device which does the trick. What's the status on this, please? It's been over a month since this was posted with no further review feedback, so I think it's ready. Getting this into qemu is blocking our next step which would be adding the feature bit to the virtio spec. James