RE: [virtio-dev] Re: [PATCH v2 repost 4/7] virtio-balloon: speed up inflate/deflate process

From: "Li, Liang Z" <liang.z.li@intel.com>
To: "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>
Cc: "Hansen, Dave" <dave.hansen@intel.com>,
	"linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	"virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org" 
	<virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org>,
	"linux-mm@kvack.org" <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
	"virtio-dev@lists.oasis-open.org"
	<virtio-dev@lists.oasis-open.org>,
	"kvm@vger.kernel.org" <kvm@vger.kernel.org>,
	"qemu-devel@nongnu.org" <qemu-devel@nongnu.org>,
	"dgilbert@redhat.com" <dgilbert@redhat.com>,
	"quintela@redhat.com" <quintela@redhat.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
	"Vlastimil Babka" <vbabka@suse.cz>,
	Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>,
	"Paolo Bonzini" <pbonzini@redhat.com>,
	Cornelia Huck <cornelia.huck@de.ibm.com>,
	Amit Shah <amit.shah@redhat.com>
Subject: RE: [virtio-dev] Re: [PATCH v2 repost 4/7] virtio-balloon: speed up inflate/deflate process
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 06:36:18 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <F2CBF3009FA73547804AE4C663CAB28E04214103@shsmsx102.ccr.corp.intel.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20160728044000-mutt-send-email-mst@kernel.org>

> > > This ends up doing a 1MB kmalloc() right?  That seems a _bit_ big.
> > > How big was the pfn buffer before?
> >
> > Yes, it is if the max pfn is more than 32GB.
> > The size of the pfn buffer use before is 256*4 = 1024 Bytes, it's too
> > small, and it's the main reason for bad performance.
> > Use the max 1MB kmalloc is a balance between performance and
> > flexibility, a large page bitmap covers the range of all the memory is
> > no good for a system with huge amount of memory. If the bitmap is too
> > small, it means we have to traverse a long list for many times, and it's bad
> for performance.
> >
> > Thanks!
> > Liang
> 
> There are all your implementation decisions though.
> 
> If guest memory is so fragmented that you only have order 0 4k pages, then
> allocating a huge 1M contigious chunk is very problematic in and of itself.
> 

The memory is allocated in the probe stage. This will not happen if the driver is
 loaded when booting the guest.

> Most people rarely migrate and do not care how fast that happens.
> Wasting a large chunk of memory (and it's zeroed for no good reason, so you
> actually request host memory for it) for everyone to speed it up when it
> does happen is not really an option.
> 
If people don't plan to do inflating/deflating, they should not enable the virtio-balloon
at the beginning, once they decide to use it, the driver should provide better performance
as much as possible.

1MB is a very small portion for a VM with more than 32GB memory and it's the *worst case*, 
for VM with less than 32GB memory, the amount of RAM depends on VM's memory size
and will be less than 1MB.

If 1MB is too big, how about 512K, or 256K?  32K seems too small.

Liang

> --
> MST
> 
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