Today the Xen ballooning is done via delayed work in a workqueue. This
might result in workqueue hangups being reported in case of large
amounts of memory are being ballooned in one go (here 16GB):

BUG: workqueue lockup - pool cpus=6 node=0 flags=0x0 nice=0 stuck for 64s!
Showing busy workqueues and worker pools:
workqueue events: flags=0x0
  pwq 12: cpus=6 node=0 flags=0x0 nice=0 active=2/256 refcnt=3
    in-flight: 229:balloon_process
    pending: cache_reap
workqueue events_freezable_power_: flags=0x84
  pwq 12: cpus=6 node=0 flags=0x0 nice=0 active=1/256 refcnt=2
    pending: disk_events_workfn
workqueue mm_percpu_wq: flags=0x8
  pwq 12: cpus=6 node=0 flags=0x0 nice=0 active=1/256 refcnt=2
    pending: vmstat_update
pool 12: cpus=6 node=0 flags=0x0 nice=0 hung=64s workers=3 idle: 2222 43

This can easily be avoided by using a dedicated kernel thread for doing
the ballooning work.
Reported-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: Boris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210827123206.15429-1-jgross@suse.comSigned-off-by: Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com>