On Wed 05-02-20 17:34:02, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> Commit 71994620bb25 ("virtio_balloon: replace oom notifier with shrinker")
> changed the behavior when deflation happens automatically. Instead of
> deflating when called by the OOM handler, the shrinker is used.
>
> However, the balloon is not simply some slab cache that should be
> shrunk when under memory pressure. The shrinker does not have a concept of
> priorities, so this behavior cannot be configured.
Adding a priority to the shrinker doesn't sound like a big problem to
me. Shrinkers already get shrink_control data structure already and
priority could be added there.
> There was a report that this results in undesired side effects when
> inflating the balloon to shrink the page cache. [1]
> "When inflating the balloon against page cache (i.e. no free memory
> remains) vmscan.c will both shrink page cache, but also invoke the
> shrinkers -- including the balloon's shrinker. So the balloon
> driver allocates memory which requires reclaim, vmscan gets this
> memory by shrinking the balloon, and then the driver adds the
> memory back to the balloon. Basically a busy no-op."
>
> The name "deflate on OOM" makes it pretty clear when deflation should
> happen - after other approaches to reclaim memory failed, not while
> reclaiming. This allows to minimize the footprint of a guest - memory
> will only be taken out of the balloon when really needed.
>
> Especially, a drop_slab() will result in the whole balloon getting
> deflated - undesired.
Could you explain why some more? drop_caches shouldn't be really used in
any production workloads and if somebody really wants all the cache to
be dropped then why is balloon any different?
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
