• Nadav Amit's avatar
    vmw_balloon: remove inflation rate limiting · ec992cc7
    Nadav Amit authored
    Since commit 33d268ed ("VMware balloon: Do not limit the amount of
    frees and allocations in non-sleep mode."), the allocations are not
    increased, and therefore balloon inflation rate limiting is in practice
    broken.
    
    While we can restore rate limiting, in practice we see that it can
    result in adverse effect, as the hypervisor throttles down the VM if it
    does not respond well enough, or alternatively causes it to perform very
    poorly as the host swaps out the VM memory. Throttling the VM down can
    even have a cascading effect, in which the VM reclaims memory even
    slower and consequentially throttled down even further.
    
    We therefore remove all the rate limiting mechanisms, including the slow
    allocation cycles, as they are likely to do more harm than good.
    
    Fixes: 33d268ed ("VMware balloon: Do not limit the amount of frees and allocations in non-sleep mode.")
    Reviewed-by: default avatarXavier Deguillard <xdeguillard@vmware.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarNadav Amit <namit@vmware.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
    ec992cc7
vmw_balloon.c 32.8 KB