VMware balloon: Do not limit the amount of frees and allocations in non-sleep mode.
When VMware's hypervisor requests a VM to reclaim memory this is preferrably done via ballooning. If the balloon driver does not return memory fast enough, more drastic methods, such as hypervisor-level swapping are needed. These other methods cause performance issues, e.g. hypervisor-level swapping requires the hypervisor to swap in a page syncronously while the virtual CPU is blocked. Hence it is in the interest of the VM to balloon memory as fast as possible. The problem with doing this is that the VM might end up doing nothing else than ballooning and the user might notice that the VM is stalled, esp. when the VM has only a single virtual CPU. This is less of a problem if the VM and the hypervisor perform balloon operations faster. Also the balloon driver yields regularly, hence on a single virtual CPU the Linux scheduler should be able to properly time-slice between ballooning and other tasks. Testing Done: quickly ballooned a lot of pages while wathing if there are any perceived hickups (periods of non-responsiveness) in the execution of the linux VM. No such hickups were seen. Signed-off-by: Xavier Deguillard <xdeguillard@vmware.com> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Please register or sign in to comment