[Xen-devel] Linux-HVM, qemu, and xen-balloon.ko

["George Dunlap" <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There seems to be some sort of a bug when qemu interacts with the
balloon driver.  Stefano is trying to repro it, but I thought I'd
share it for people to look at.

Host:
+ Debian 4.0 host installation
+ Vanilla -unstable xen dom0 kernel, hypervisor, and qemu-dm (all
pulled this morning)
+ 4G of ram
VM:
+ Debian 4.0 Linux HVM, 2.6.18-6-i686 package
+ unmodified_drivers/ modules compiled for xen-platform-pci, and xen-balloon
+ 512M of RAM assigned
+ Disk and network are still emulated, using qemu

To repro:
* Boot the VM
* modprobe xen_balloon
* In one VM shell:
 # while true ; do rm -f zero ; dd if=/dev/zero of=zero ; done
* In another VM shell, use 'free' to see when the amount of free
memory is near zero
* In dom0:
 # xm mem-set debian-hvm 256
* In the VM shell, use 'free' to see when the amount of total memory
reaches 256 (this may take awhile, as the guest OS has to write data
out to disk.)
* In dom0:
 # xm mem-set debian-hvm 512

qemu will crash shortly.

When I install xen-vbd in the initrd, the problem goes away.  So it
seems almost certain that there's some mapping in qemu not getting
flushed when the balloon driver hands pages back to Xen, so that when
it asks Xen for pages again, and then tries to DMA into the same gpfn
space, something gets lost in the translation.

Any ideas?

Peace,
 -George

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