• Raushaniya Maksudova's avatar
    virtio_balloon: free some memory from balloon on OOM · 5a10b7db
    Raushaniya Maksudova authored
    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 some memory at the last moment before some process will be 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 to return and retry the allocation that forced the out of
    memory killer to run.
    
    Allocate virtio  feature bit for this: it is not set by default,
    the the guest will not deflate virtio balloon on OOM without explicit
    permission from host.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRaushaniya Maksudova <rmaksudova@parallels.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDenis V. Lunev <den@openvz.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarMichael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
    5a10b7db
virtio_balloon.h 2.74 KB