Re: Linux balloon driver stops accepting target_kb for a long time

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@novell.com>]

>>> On 24.08.10 at 00:45, Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com> wrote:
> Reviewing code, one thing caught my attention.  In balloon_process(),
> the balloon_mutex is down'ed then, under certain conditions
> schedule() is called with the balloon_mutex still held and without
> another timer set.  Any chance this could be a problem, especially
> if another kernel thread invokes balloon_set_new_target()?
> If so, what might finally kick the scheduled-out thread after
> 30 minutes to reset the balloon_timer and up the mutex?

How could this be a problem? Calling schedule() is a yield, not an
indefinite sleep, and hence the loop will resume as soon as there's
no higher priority runnable task anymore for a long enough time
(obviously very much less than 30 minutes, unless something
really odd is running on your box).

Furthermore, besides the obvious option of inserting some debug
code, I think SysRq-t would also allow you to check whether
balloon_process() indeed doesn't exit over a period of minutes.

Jan