[libvirt] Virtio Ballon driver problem

[Pankaj Rawat]

Well the process which get killed is the process running on guest trying
to use memory , It is a simple c program having malloc function to do
the memory requirement thing(Tested and working)
The memory given to the guest is 400MB which is less then the maximum
memory as specified rest of memory is with ballon

Now the virsh setmem command is correctly working but this has to be
done manually . Didn't the documentation said that this is a dynamic
process So each time a guest is running out of memory the host will
fetch some memory from its own or other guest memory pages and give it
to the guest which is running out of memory. Well I don't see that
happening , instead of allocating more memory to guest VM . It is
killing the process which is requesting more memory. 
Can you help how can I achieve such dynamic behavior from the ballon
driver so that I don't have to run command manually In order to get more
memory ??

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Blake [mailto:eblake at redhat.com] 
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 8:59 PM
To: Pankaj Rawat
Cc: libvir-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: [libvirt] Virtio Ballon driver problem

On 12/09/2011 02:39 AM, Pankaj Rawat wrote:
> Hi .well I am trying to use virtioballon driver on my KVM host . I 
> have assigned 400 MB current memory to my guest
> 
> The ballon size is 600MB but when I used all the 400MB of guest the 
> RAM of guest is not increasing.
> 
>  
> 
> I watch the ram usage by running following command
> 
> #free -m

Is that in the host or in the guest?

> 
> But the guest is only using memory upto 400MB after that the process 
> is killed .

Which process?  The guest process trying to use memory, or the host qemu
process running the guest?  Can you show actual transcripts of your
testing?  Assigning 400MiB current memory to the guest implies that the
balloon driver in the guest will prevent the guest from using more than
400MiB, even if the max allocation is higher.  The balloon driver in the
guest does not have the ability to dynamically request more memory from
the host, rather, balloon expansion or contraction is controlled by host
actions.


> 
> I don't see the ballon driver coming into picture. It is not doing 
> anything

On the host, did you use the 'virsh setmem' command (or other language
binding to access the virDomainSetMemory API), which is the documented
way to have the host request the guest to change the allocation consumed
by the guest's balloon driver?

> The ballon driver is loaded in host as well as guest

The balloon driver only matters in the guest; it is a guest device
designed for cooperation with host control.

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-- 
Eric Blake   eblake at redhat.com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org




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