Re: RE: Ballooning up

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@citrix.com>]

On Tue, 2010-09-14 at 23:05 +0100, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote: 
> On 09/14/2010 08:06 AM, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
> >> true, if you don't intend to balloon up, there's no point wasting
> >> memory on unused page structures.
> > I think this is the key.  If dom0_mem is NOT specified, dom0
> > launches with (essentially) all the physical memory of the
> > machine, page tables are allocated in dom0 to map all of physical
> > memory, and auto-ballooning is necessary to launch guests.
> >
> > If dom0_mem IS specified, it is often a much smaller number
> > than size of physical memory; why waste ~1.5% of physical memory
> > on page structures that will never be used?
> >
> > If someone wants to add an option to augment dom0_mem to allow
> > memory-up-ballooning of dom0 above dom0_mem (and can justify
> > a reason why some user might ever use this functionality),
> > that's fine.  But let's not change the definition of the
> > dom0_mem option just because a bug fix happens to make it
> > possible.
> 
> Technically (pedantically), the meaning of dom0_mem is unchanged - it
> sets the initial number of pages given to the domain, and is
> functionally identical to the normal "memory" parameter in a domU config
> file.  The difference is that we're now paying attention to the E820
> map, which is set by maxmem= in domU, but is the hardware/BIOS one in dom0.
> 
> I'm not sure what I'm doing that's different to the xenolinux kernels; I
> guess they hack up the whole memory init path more aggressively.  But
> the pvops behaviour is more or less the straightforward outcome of
> looking at the Xen-provided E820 and reserving the gaps between the
> actual page count and the memory described therein.

xenolinux treats the XENMEM_memory_map and XENMEM_machine_memory_map as
separate things in some wierd split-brain understanding of the physical
address space. Try looking in /proc/iomem on a xenolinux kernel -- IIRC
it has a mish-mash of both address spaces in it...

What PVops does is far more sane.

Ian.