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Re: [Xen-devel] testing the balloon driver

To: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] testing the balloon driver
From: Ian Pratt <Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 23:06:07 +0100
Cc: "Mark A. Williamson" <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Delivery-date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 23:12:01 +0100
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> On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> > I was able to reproduce the problem without resizing
> > the VM, too.  It could just be a 2.6.8.1 thing...
> 
> Looks like yum just needed more than 100MB of RAM and
> 100MB of swap.  Adding another 200MB of swap makes yum
> run fine, though slowly, while doing the random ballooning
> of both the unprivileged guest and guest 0 once a second.
> 
> The system seems stable, if horribly slow ;)

I'm kinda surprised that the balloon driver's aggressive memory
grabbing doesn't cause the OOM killer to start selecting
victims for extermination. 

If it really seems stable then maybe we don't have to add rate
limiting to the balloon driver after all? We grab the pages with
GFP_HIGHUSER. Maybe that's sufficiently non aggressive as-is?

I still think we should make all increase/decrease reservation
calls (e.g. those associated with netfront) go through the
balloon driver so that we can handle some of the low memory cases
more gracefully.

Ian


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