On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 03:06:56PM +0000, Philip Moltmann wrote: > Hi, > > thanks for taking so much interest in this driver. It is quite good > that our design choices get scrutinized by non-current VMware > employees. > > > > I understand that you negotiate the capabilities between hypervisor > > and > > the balloon driver, however that was not my concern (and I am sorry > > that > > I did not express it properly). > > > > The patch description stated: > > > > "Before this patch the slow memory transfer would cause the > > destination > > VM to have internal swapping until all memory is transferred. Now the > > memory is transferred fast enough so that the destination VM does not > > swap." > > > > As far as I understand the improvements in memory transfer speed > > hinge > > on the availability of batched operations, you however remove the > > limits > > on non-sleep allocations unconditionally. Thus my question: on older > > ESXi's that do not support batcher operations won't this cause VM to > > start swapping? > > Three improvements contribute to the overall faster speed: > - batched operations reduce the hypervisor overhead per page > - 2m instead of 4k buffer reduce the hypervisor overhead per page > - removing the rate-limiting for non-sleep allocations allows the guest > operating system to reclaim memory as fast as it can instead of > artificially limiting it. > > Any of these improvements is great by itself and helps a lot. The > combination of all three makes a rather dramatic difference. > > We cause hypervisor-level swapping if the balloon driver does not > reclaim fast enough. As any of these improvements increases reclamation > speed, we reduce swapping risk in any case. > > Unfortunately the first two improvements rely on hypervisor support, > the last does not.
As far as I can understand the justification for removing the limit (improvement #3) is that we have #1 and #2, at least that's how I read the patch description. I am saying: what if you running on a hypervisor that does not support neither #1 nor #2? What was the first release that of ESXi supports batching and 2M pages? What about workstation (I don't recall if it started using ballooning at some point)? Thanks. -- Dmitry -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/