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  • Ian Campbell's avatar
    xen: try harder to balloon up under memory pressure. · bc2c0303
    Ian Campbell authored
    
    
    Currently if the balloon driver is unable to increase the guest's
    reservation it assumes the failure was due to reaching its full
    allocation, gives up on the ballooning operation and records the limit
    it reached as the "hard limit". The driver will not try again until
    the target is set again (even to the same value).
    
    However it is possible that ballooning has in fact failed due to
    memory pressure in the host and therefore it is desirable to keep
    attempting to reach the target in case memory becomes available. The
    most likely scenario is that some guests are ballooning down while
    others are ballooning up and therefore there is temporary memory
    pressure while things stabilise. You would not expect a well behaved
    toolstack to ask a domain to balloon to more than its allocation nor
    would you expect it to deliberately over-commit memory by setting
    balloon targets which exceed the total host memory.
    
    This patch drops the concept of a hard limit and causes the balloon
    driver to retry increasing the reservation on a timer in the same
    manner as when decreasing the reservation.
    
    Also if we partially succeed in increasing the reservation
    (i.e. receive less pages than we asked for) then we may as well keep
    those pages rather than returning them to Xen.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIan Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>
    Cc: Stable Kernel <stable@kernel.org>
    bc2c0303