[Xen-devel] Re: [PATCH v2] Use ballooned pages for gntdev

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2011-03-09 at 23:07 +0000, Daniel De Graaf wrote:
> Split up the balloon module, similar to how grants and events are
> handled. This allow gntdev to use ballooned pages without adding a
> dependency on the balloon module.
> 
> The interface is slightly different from that exposed in 2.6.32; the
> page vector is allocated by the caller, not by the balloon driver. This
> allows more freedom in how the returned pages are used, since they do
> not all have to be returned to the balloon driver at the same time. It
> also tries to reuse already ballooned pages rather than always
> ballooning new pages to ensure they are in low memory as the 2.6.32
> version did.
> 
> Changes since v1:
>       * Rebased on konrad/devel/{balloon-hotplug,next-2.6.38} merge
>       * Better function names
>       * Adjust balloon stats for requested pages
> 
> [PATCH 1/3] xen-balloon: Move core balloon functionality out of module
> [PATCH 2/3] xen-balloon: Add interface to retrieve ballooned pages
> [PATCH 3/3] xen-gntdev: Use ballooned pages for grant mappings

Does this introduces a new potential failure case? When a normal balloon
operation takes place is it is now possible for the ballooned_pages list
to be empty (because gntdev has stolen stuff from it) where before we
knew the list was non-empty at that point?

e.g. increase_reservation includes:
                page = balloon_retrieve();
                BUG_ON(page == NULL);
as well as:
        page = balloon_first_page();
        for (i = 0; i < nr_pages; i++) {
                BUG_ON(page == NULL);
                frame_list[i] = page_to_pfn(page);
                page = balloon_next_page(page);
        }

Are we sure we aren't about to exercise those BUG_ONs?

As a secondary concern, assuming we don't crash, does the balloon
process correctly sleep until explicitly kicked when ballooned_pages
becomes empty? Or does it keep needlessly waking up on the jiffy timer?
IOW does credit in balloon_process become 0 when this situation occurs?

Or does adjusting the balloon stats ensure this all works out alright?

An interesting experiment would probably be to allocate a bunch of
address space via gntdev and then manually balloon the guest above it's
current allocation, back below the lower limit due to the gntdev
allocation, back up to starting point etc etc.

Ian.


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