Hi, We have a situation where our qemu processes need to be launched under cgroup cpuset.mems control. This introduces an similar issue that was discussed a few years ago. The difference here is that for our case, not being able to allocate from DMA32 zone is a result a cgroup restriction not mempolicy enforcement. Here is the steps to reproduce the failure, mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset/nodeX (where X is a node not having DMA32 zone) echo X > /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset/nodeX/cpuset.mems echo X > /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset/nodeX/cpuset.cpus echo 1 > /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset/node0/cpuset.mem_hardwall echo $$ > /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset/nodeX/tasks #launch a virtual machine kvm_init_vcpu failed: Cannot allocate memory There are workarounds, like always putting qemu processes onto the node with DMA32 zone or not restricting qemu processes memory allocation until that DMA32 alloc finishes (difficult to be precise). But we would like to find a way to address the root cause. Considering the fact that the pae_root shadow should not be needed when ept is in use, which is indeed our case - ept is always available for us (guessing this is the same case for most of other users), we made a patch roughly like this, diff --git a/arch/x86/kvm/mmu.c b/arch/x86/kvm/mmu.c index d594690..1d1b61e 100644 --- a/arch/x86/kvm/mmu.c +++ b/arch/x86/kvm/mmu.c @@ -5052,7 +5052,7 @@ int kvm_mmu_create(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu) vcpu->arch.mmu.translate_gpa = translate_gpa; vcpu->arch.nested_mmu.translate_gpa = translate_nested_gpa; - return alloc_mmu_pages(vcpu); + return tdp_enabled ? 0 : alloc_mmu_pages(vcpu); } void kvm_mmu_setup(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu) It works through our test cases. But we would really like to have your insight on this patch before applying it in production environment and contributing it back to the community. Thanks in advance for any help you may provide! Thanks, Liang Chen