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Re: [Qemu-devel] [BUG] Balloon malfunctions with memory hotplug


From: Alexandre DERUMIER
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [BUG] Balloon malfunctions with memory hotplug
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2015 12:50:07 +0100 (CET)

Hi, 

I think they was already reported some month ago,

and a patch was submitted to the mailing list (but waiting that memory unplug 
was merged before apply it)

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2014-11/msg02362.html




----- Mail original -----
De: "Luiz Capitulino" <address@hidden>
À: "qemu-devel" <address@hidden>
Cc: "kvm" <address@hidden>, "Igor Mammedov" <address@hidden>, "zhang 
zhanghailiang" <address@hidden>, address@hidden, "Eric Blake" <address@hidden>, 
"Michael S. Tsirkin" <address@hidden>, "amit shah" <address@hidden>
Envoyé: Jeudi 26 Février 2015 20:26:29
Objet: [BUG] Balloon malfunctions with memory hotplug

Hello, 

Reproducer: 

1. Start QEMU with balloon and memory hotplug support: 

# qemu [...] -m 1G,slots=2,maxmem=2G -balloon virtio 

2. Check balloon size: 

(qemu) info balloon 
balloon: actual=1024 
(qemu) 

3. Hotplug some memory: 

(qemu) object_add memory-backend-ram,id=mem1,size=1G 
(qemu) device_add pc-dimm,id=dimm1,memdev=mem1 

4. This is step is _not_ needed to reproduce the problem, 
but you may need to online memory manually on Linux so 
that it becomes available in the guest 

5. Check balloon size again: 

(qemu) info balloon 
balloon: actual=1024 
(qemu) 

BUG: The guest now has 2GB of memory, but the balloon thinks 
the guest has 1GB 

One may think that the problem is that the balloon driver is 
ignoring hotplugged memory. This is not what's happening. If 
you do balloon your guest, there's nothing stopping the 
balloon driver in the guest from ballooning hotplugged memory. 

The problem is that the balloon device in QEMU needs to know 
the current amount of memory available to the guest. 

Before memory hotplug this information was easy to obtain: the 
current amount of memory available to the guest is the memory the 
guest was booted with. This value is stored in the ram_size global 
variable in QEMU and this is what the balloon device emulation 
code uses today. However, when memory is hotplugged ram_size is 
_not_ updated and the balloon device breaks. 

I see two possible solutions for this problem: 

1. In addition to reading ram_size, the balloon device in QEMU 
could scan pc-dimm devices to account for hotplugged memory. 

This solution was already implemented by zhanghailiang: 

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2014-11/msg02362.html 

It works, except that on Linux memory hotplug is a two-step 
procedure: first memory is inserted then it has to be onlined 
from user-space. So, if memory is inserted but not onlined 
this solution gives the opposite problem: the balloon device 
will report a larger memory amount than the guest actually has. 

Can we live with that? I guess not, but I'm open for discussion. 

If QEMU could be notified when Linux makes memory online, then 
the problem would be gone. But I guess this can't be done. 

2. Modify the balloon driver in the guest to inform the balloon 
device on the host about the current memory available to the 
guest. This way, whenever the balloon device in QEMU needs 
to know the current amount of memory in the guest, it asks 
the guest. This drops any usage of ram_size in the balloon 
device 

I'm not completely sure this is feasible though. For example, 
what happens if the guest reports a memory amount to QEMU and 
right after this more memory is plugged? 

Besides, this solution is more complex than solution 1 and 
won't address older guests. 

Another important detail is that, I *suspect* that a very similar 
bug already exists with 32-bit guests even without memory 
hotplug: what happens if you assign 6GB to a 32-bit without PAE 
support? I think the same problem we're seeing with memory 
hotplug will happen and solution 1 won't fix this, although 
no one seems to care about 32-bit guests... 
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