Am 09.06.2015 um 12:19 schrieb Denis V. Lunev: > 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.
The balloon frees pages in this way static void balloon_page(void *addr, int deflate) { #if defined(__linux__) if (!kvm_enabled() || kvm_has_sync_mmu()) qemu_madvise(addr, TARGET_PAGE_SIZE, deflate ? QEMU_MADV_WILLNEED : QEMU_MADV_DONTNEED); #endif } The guest can re-touch that page and get a empty zero or the old page back without tampering the host integrity. This should work for all cases I am aware of (without sync_mmu its a nop anyway) so why not enable that by default? Anything that I missed? Christian > > 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. > > Signed-off-by: Denis V. Lunev <d...@openvz.org> > CC: Raushaniya Maksudova <rmaksud...@virtuozzo.com> > CC: Anthony Liguori <aligu...@amazon.com> > CC: Michael S. Tsirkin <m...@redhat.com> > --- > hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.c | 6 ++++-- > include/hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.h | 1 + > 2 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) > > diff --git a/hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.c b/hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.c > index f915c7b..d3f36f8 100644 > --- a/hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.c > +++ b/hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.c > @@ -312,8 +312,8 @@ static void virtio_balloon_set_config(VirtIODevice *vdev, > > static uint64_t virtio_balloon_get_features(VirtIODevice *vdev, uint64_t f) > { > - f |= (1 << VIRTIO_BALLOON_F_STATS_VQ); > - return f; > + VirtIOBalloon *dev = VIRTIO_BALLOON(vdev); > + return f | (1u << VIRTIO_BALLOON_F_STATS_VQ) | dev->host_features; > } > > static void virtio_balloon_stat(void *opaque, BalloonInfo *info) > @@ -423,6 +423,8 @@ static void virtio_balloon_instance_init(Object *obj) > } > > static Property virtio_balloon_properties[] = { > + DEFINE_PROP_BIT("deflate-on-oom", VirtIOBalloon, host_features, > + VIRTIO_BALLOON_F_DEFLATE_ON_OOM, false), > DEFINE_PROP_END_OF_LIST(), > }; > > diff --git a/include/hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.h > b/include/hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.h > index 4ab8f54..7f49b1f 100644 > --- a/include/hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.h > +++ b/include/hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.h > @@ -36,6 +36,7 @@ typedef struct VirtIOBalloon { > QEMUTimer *stats_timer; > int64_t stats_last_update; > int64_t stats_poll_interval; > + uint32_t host_features; > } VirtIOBalloon; > > #endif >