On Fri, 2015-02-27 at 09:57 +0300, Denis V. Lunev wrote: > Excessive virtio_balloon inflation can cause invocation of OOM-killer, > when Linux is under severe memory pressure. Various mechanisms are > responsible for correct virtio_balloon memory management. Nevertheless it > is often the case that these control tools does not have enough time to > react on fast changing memory load. As a result OS runs out of memory and > invokes OOM-killer. The balancing of memory by use of the virtio balloon > should not cause the termination of processes while there are pages in the > balloon. Now there is no way for virtio balloon driver to free memory at > the last moment before some process get killed by OOM-killer. > > This does not provide a security breach as balloon itself is running > inside Guest OS and is working in the cooperation with the host. Thus > some improvements from Guest side should be considered as normal. > > To solve the problem, introduce a virtio_balloon callback which is > expected to be called from the oom notifier call chain in out_of_memory() > function. If virtio balloon could release some memory, it will make the > system return and retry the allocation that forced the out of memory > killer to run. > > This behavior should be enabled if and only if appropriate feature bit > is set on the device. It is off by default. > > This functionality was recently merged into vanilla Linux. > > commit 5a10b7dbf904bfe01bb9fcc6298f7df09eed77d5 > Author: Raushaniya Maksudova <rmaksud...@parallels.com> > Date: Mon Nov 10 09:36:29 2014 +1030 > > This patch adds respective control bits into QEMU. It introduces > deflate-on-oom option for balloon device which does the trick.
What's the status on this, please? It's been over a month since this was posted with no further review feedback, so I think it's ready. Getting this into qemu is blocking our next step which would be adding the feature bit to the virtio spec. James