I've been testing the patch few days, the bolloon OOM notifier patch seems to do a good jobs freeing memory before OOM killer is about to kill a process. Although on few ocassions it wasn't enough. But if you're memory target is anywhere within some range of freeram, and it's hard to say how much but 3 to 6% or less, guest locks up, with stack backtraces from vballoon thread, or other processes and page reclaim code prints messages. Also I get bad page state errors. Admin looses access to guest. I tried to use the 'admin_reserve_kbytes' approach, create a buffer range - and sanity check the target value. I have not seen any issues with loads I'm running but it's still may be susceptible to a rapid free memory drop while balloon is inflating. Of course making the gap larger (min_reserve) makes it less susceptible or removes it altogether. I included sample patch. Would appreciate suggestions, on how to make inflate a safe operation, so in the worst case aggressive page reclaim, or OOM killer kick in. I tested on ARM & x86. - Mario --- a/drivers/virtio/virtio_balloon.c +++ b/drivers/virtio/virtio_balloon.c @@ -284,12 +284,22 @@ static void virtballoon_changed(struct virtio_device *vdev) static inline s64 towards_target(struct virtio_balloon *vb) { __le32 v; - s64 target; + s64 diff; + unsigned long min_reserve; + struct sysinfo si; virtio_cread(vb->vdev, struct virtio_balloon_config, num_pages, &v); - target = le32_to_cpu(v); - return target - vb->num_pages; + diff = (s64) le32_to_cpu(v) - vb->num_pages; + si_meminfo(&si); + + min_reserve = min((unsigned long) (si.freeram - (3 * si.freeram/100)), + (unsigned long) (0x800000 >> PAGE_SHIFT)); + + if(diff == 0 || diff >= (si.freeram - min_reserve)) + return 0; + + return diff; } On 02/06/2015 07:57 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > > > On 06/02/2015 02:18, Mario Smarduch wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I'm looking into qemu/balloon driver VM overcommit. I noticed >> virtio-balloon driver will take any setting from virtio-balloon-device >> to the point Guest dies. >> >> For a 1G guest >> $ sudo echo balloon 100 | socat - tcp4-connect:127.0.0.1:4444 >> >> you get (same with libvirt setmem) >> >> root@localhost:~# free >> -bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory >> root@localhost:~# ps >> -bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory >> >> $ sudo info balloon | socat ... - confirms setting >> >> The balloon driver has been there for a while, not sure what I'm missing? >> >> virtio-balloon-device provide free memory, i.e., - externally accessible >> to host. But this appears more like a hint for an inflate request, snmp >> mibs >> provide more detailed resource info then that. >> >> I'm wondering if the driver should not have some heuristic >> check for an inflate request so it doesn't over inflate? Similar to >> kernel overcommit. > > See this patch: > > commit 5a10b7dbf904bfe01bb9fcc6298f7df09eed77d5 > Author: Raushaniya Maksudova <rmaksudova@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Date: Mon Nov 10 09:36:29 2014 +1030 > > virtio_balloon: free some memory from balloon on OOM > > Looks like the QEMU part was never posted though. > > Paolo > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html