Under Microsoft Hyper-V and WSL2 virtual machine environments, heavy memory pressure and memory tiering workloads (e.g. swap-heavy tasks, containerized compilation, in-memory databases) frequently expose guest kernels to starvation across two critical VMBus mechanisms:
1. Control-plane and heartbeat starvation: During aggressive direct reclaim, available pages drop below safety watermarks. Atomic allocations (GFP_ATOMIC) required by synthetic VMBus packets, virtual network switches (netvsc), and balloon management fail. When the guest fails to service host heartbeats, the Windows Host Compute System (HCS) watchdog presumes a guest hard lock, triggering abrupt virtual switch teardowns (Hyper-V-VmSwitch Event 102/291) and ungracefully restarting the VM prior to any Linux OOM killer intervention. Concurrently, host balloon driver requests exacerbate exhaustion. 2. High-order contiguous allocation failures: Dynamically instantiated VMBus sub-channels (e.g., synthetic SCSI, network, and vsock) invoke vmbus_alloc_ring(), requiring order-7 (512 KiB) contiguous physical pages via alloc_pages(GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_ZERO, order). Severe buddy allocator fragmentation causes alloc_pages() to fail with -ENOMEM even when ample virtual memory exists. On WSL2, this directly manifests as userspace communication failures (e.g. "accept4 failed 110: Connection timed out" on vsock control planes). This series resolves both issues: - Patch 1/2 dynamically establishes a memory headroom floor for vm.min_free_kbytes during late_initcall (clamped between 64 MiB and 512 MiB based on 3.125% of total guest RAM), safeguarding atomic allocations and VMBus heartbeats. It also defers balloon driver inflation when available memory drops below totalram_pages() / 32 to avoid competing with direct reclaim. - Patch 2/2 introduces a fallback to vzalloc_node() / vzalloc() in vmbus_alloc_ring() when high-order physical allocation fails, adapts hv_ringbuffer_init() using vmalloc_to_page() for double-mapped ring wraparounds, and preserves Confidential VM (CoCo) guest memory re-encryption guarantees in vmbus_free_ring(). Verification & Testing: Tested and validated against Microsoft WSL2 rolling-lts 6.18 kernel under multi-tier memory pressure (13.66 GB/s transfer bandwidth across ZRAM, VRAM, and SSD tiers), verifying zero kernel panics, zero HCS disconnects, and flawless vsock channel open resilience. Related issue discussions: - https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/41634 - https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/40795 Emerson Busson (2): hv: vmbus: prevent control-plane starvation and balloon thrash under memory pressure hv: vmbus: add virtual memory fallback for ring buffer allocations under memory pressure drivers/hv/channel.c | 46 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----- drivers/hv/hv_balloon.c | 12 ++++++++++ drivers/hv/hv_common.c | 32 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ drivers/hv/hyperv_vmbus.h | 2 +- drivers/hv/ring_buffer.c | 19 +++++++++++----- include/linux/hyperv.h | 2 ++ 6 files changed, 101 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-) -- 2.43.0
