[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] x86: expose XENMEM_get_pod_target to subject domain



On 04/02/2014 09:52 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 01.04.14 at 19:05, <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 5:55 PM, George Dunlap
<George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So the basic issue, regardless of PoD, is that the guest is told to
balloon down to X, by handing back (T - X) pages to Xen.  But it
doesn't actually know what T is, for a number of reasons; mainly due
to having holes in lowmem for vga ram and things like that.  When PoD
is enabled, this may cause a guest to end up killed as a result of
accidentally not ballooning down enough; but even on non-PoD systems,
this would lead to a small mismatch between the toolstack's idea of
how much a VM was using (or should be using) and how much the guest is
using.

It looks like libxl anyway already writes "static-max" into xenstore,
right next to the balloon target.  Is there any reason we can't use
the toolstack-written static-max to calculate how big a balloon we
need to inflate?

If it's not accruate or consistent at the moment, we should be able to
make it consistent going forward.
One potential problem I see at the moment is that during domain
creation, "static-max" is set to maxmem, but "target" is set to
"memory-video_memkb"; but the actual number of pages will be memory -
VGA_HOLE, which probably won't match either one.  Then in
libxl_set_memory_target(), it's just straight-up set to "target".
This may lead to a rather unexpected situation where after starting
with memory=2048, setting the target to 1024, and then setting it back
to 2048, the guest has a different amount of memory than it started
with.  (Or perhaps the balloon driver will be running up against the
memory ceiling.)

It would be ideal if the balloon driver could just release (static-max
- target) memory and be assured that everything would be OK.
Another problem is that "target" (or in fact anything in xenstore) isn't
tightly coupled with what the hypervisor knows for the domain. Yet
the main goal (preventing to be killed due to ballooning down to much)
depends on only the hypervisor's knowledge, and hence I think that
only the hypervisor should be consulted to find out.

I understand the sentiment; but as I said, the real problem is a lack of clarity about what exactly the toolstack is asking the VM to do. This is obviously a particular problem in the case of PoD, but it's still a problem even for non-PoD guests; it's just that the outcomes are less severe. If we solve the general problem, we'll solve the PoD problem.

The other thing is that the whole point of PoD is to be transparent to the guest. Xen is already careful in how it handles post-creation adjustments to the PoD size -- always increasing the PoD cache, never decreasing it -- specifically so that the guest doesn't need to know.

What should really happen at some point is for PoD to just become a special case of swapping. In a sense, that's almost the same issue: you could have a situation where the toolstack asks a guest to balloon down, and the guest does so; but not as low as the toolstack expected, so the toolstack labels the guest as "misbehaving" and tells Xen to swap out pages until it reaches what the toolstack thinks is the correct value. The guest won't crash, but performance will be impacted.

The target in xenstore could be made tightly coupled: if the toolstack always wrote into xenstore exactly what it reported to Xen, then it would be the same.

Alternately, since now Xen is involved with ballooning targets -- whether you're doing PoD or swapping -- maybe we should consider moving the "target" into Xen entirely. Then there would be no chance for "drift", as Xen and the balloon driver would be working from the same data. This would be basically repurposing the get/set pod_target hypercall to something specifically for ballooning.

 -George

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel


 


Rackspace

Lists.xenproject.org is hosted with RackSpace, monitoring our
servers 24x7x365 and backed by RackSpace's Fanatical Support®.