OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

virtio message

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]


Subject: Re: [virtio] New virtio balloon...


"Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com> writes:
> On Mon, Feb 03, 2014 at 02:29:36PM +0100, Daniel Kiper wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 02, 2014 at 06:21:14PM +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>> > On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 04:01:39PM +1030, Rusty Russell wrote:
>> > > That's very hard to define across guests.  Should we be using stats for
>> > > that instead?  In fact, should we allow gratuitous stats sending,
>> > > instead of a simple NEED_MEM flag?
>> 
>> I think that it should be simple as possible. Guest just set new target and host
>> fulfill request or not. Guest slow down requests from balloon if requests cannot
>> be fulfilled some time. That is all.
>
> Hmm that's exactly the reverse of what Rusty suggests.

Indeed.  The current balloon is entirely host-led.  There's no way for
the guest to give feedback except by failing to meet the target.

This proposal only modifies that so that the guest can send "need_mem"
and associated stats.  These stats are fairly generic, so should be
OS-agnostic (and a guest can omit them if it can't tell).

> Guest has best knowledge how to calculate
>  memory needs.

True, but not actually useful.

The guest has the most information, but it still can't reliably predict
the effect of adding more memory.  Because last time I read the
literature, that problem was Very Hard.  I would *love* a heuristic so
that the guest can say "if you give me X MB, page faults will drop by
50%", but think in practice everyone just increments a few MB at a time
until the pain stops, right?

But even if we had such a thing, the guest has NO IDEA how bad its
problems are, because bad is relative.  So it has to have a way of
reporting its pain level to the host, who *can* balance things.

I chose to use stats + "need_mem" flag reporting for that method.  But
if the host doesn't increase the target, the guest should not disobey.

Cheers,
Rusty.



[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]