Re: [Xen-devel] Xen balloon driver improvement (version 1)

[Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2014, David Vrabel wrote:
> On 22/10/14 17:29, Wei Liu wrote:
> > 
> > ### Make use of balloon page compaction
> [...]
> > The core of migration callback is XENMEM\_exchange hypercall. This
> > makes sure that inflation of old page and deflation of new page is
> > done atomically, so even if a domain is beyond its memory target and
> > being enforced, it can still compact memory.
> 
> XENMEM_exchange doesn't really have the behaviour that is needed here.
> 
> Page migration splits the memory map into two parts, the populated area
> at the bottom and the balloon area.  The populated area is fragmented by
> ballooned pages, and the balloon area is fragmented by populated pages.
> 
> Consider a single ballooned page in the middle of an otherwise intact
> superframe.  Page migration wants to populate this page and depopulate a
> different page from the balloon area.
> 
> A hypercall that can do an atomic populate and depopulate will allow xen
> to easily recreate the superframe (if the missing frame is free).
> XENMEM_exchange will leave the superframe fragmented.
 
XENMEM_exchange should be capable of doing that. If it is not today, it
could be fixed. Am I missing something? What the problem at the
interface level with XENMEM_exchange?



> XENMEM_exchange would be an acceptable fallback when this new hypercall
> is not availble.
>
> > ## Flowcharts
> > 
> > These flowcharts assume normal page size is 4K and huge page size is
> > 2M.  They show how two queues are maintained.
> 
> Having to break 2M pages into 4k ones to meet a target suggests that the
> toolstack should allocate a domain with 2M multiples and should set the
> target in 2M multiples only.  The autoballoon driver will also need to
> set the target in 2M multiples.

That's a good low hanging fruit to pick

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