On Tue, Feb 4, 2020 at 10:57 PM Michael S. Tsirkin [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, Feb 04, 2020 at 03:58:51PM -0800, Tyler Sanderson wrote:

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    >     >
    >     >  1. It is last-resort, which means the system has already

gone     through

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    >     >     heroics to prevent OOM. Those heroic reclaim efforts

are     expensive

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    >     >     and impact application performance.
    >
    >     That's *exactly* what "deflate on OOM" suggests.
    >
    >
    > It seems there are some use cases where "deflate on OOM" is

desired and

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    > others where "deflate on pressure" is desired.
    > This suggests adding a new feature bit "DEFLATE_ON_PRESSURE" that
    > registers the shrinker, and reverting DEFLATE_ON_OOM to use the OOM
    > notifier callback.
    >
    > This lets users configure the balloon for their use case.

    You want the old behavior back, so why should we introduce a new

one? Or

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    am I missing something? (you did want us to revert to old handling,

no?)

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Reverting actually doesn't help me because this has been the behavior

since

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Linux 4.19 which is already widely in use. So my device implementation

needs to

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handle the shrinker behavior anyways. I started this conversation to ask

what

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the intended device implementation was.

I think there are reasonable device implementations that would prefer the
shrinker behavior (it turns out that mine doesn't).
For example, an implementation that slowly inflates the balloon for the

purpose

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of memory overcommit. It might leave the balloon inflated and expect any

memory

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pressure (including page cache usage) to deflate the balloon as a way to
dynamically right-size the balloon.

So just to make sure we understand, what exactly does your
implementation do?

My implementation is for the purposes of opportunistic memory overcommit.
We always want to give balloon memory back to the guest rather than causing
an OOM, so we use DEFLATE_ON_OOM.
We leave the balloon at size 0 while monitoring memory statistics reported
on the stats queue. When we see there is an opportunity for significant
savings then we inflate the balloon to a desired size (possibly including
pressuring the page cache), and then immediately deflate back to size 0.
The host pages backing the guest pages are unbacked during the inflation
process, so the memory footprint of the guest is smaller after this
inflate/deflate cycle.

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Two reasons I didn't go with the above implementation:
1. I need to support guests before Linux 4.19 which don't have the

shrinker

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behavior.
2. Memory in the balloon does not appear as "available" in /proc/meminfo

even

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though it is freeable. This is confusing to users, but isn't a deal

breaker.

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If we added a DEFLATE_ON_PRESSURE feature bit that indicated shrinker API
support then that would resolve reason #1 (ideally we would backport the

bit to

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4.19).

We could declare lack of pagecache pressure with DEFLATE_ON_OOM a
regression and backport the revert but not I think the new
DEFLATE_ON_PRESSURE.

To be clear, the page cache can still be pressured. When the balloon driver
allocates memory and causes reclaim, some of that memory comes from the
balloon (bad) but some of that comes from the page cache (good).

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In any case, the shrinker behavior when pressuring page cache is more of

an

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inefficiency than a bug. It's not clear to me that it necessitates

reverting.

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If there were/are reasons to be on the shrinker interface then I think

those

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carry similar weight as the problem itself.



    I consider virtio-balloon to this very day a big hack. And I don't

see

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    it getting better with new config knobs. Having that said, the
    technologies that are candidates to replace it (free page reporting,
    taming the guest page cache, etc.) are still not ready - so we'll

have

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    to stick with it for now :( .

    >
    > I'm actually not sure how you would safely do memory overcommit

without

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    > DEFLATE_ON_OOM. So I think it unlocks a huge use case.

    Using better suited technologies that are not ready yet (well, some

form

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    of free page reporting is available under IBM z already but in a
    proprietary form) ;) Anyhow, I remember that DEFLATE_ON_OOM only

makes

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    it less likely to crash your guest, but not that you are safe to

squeeze

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    the last bit out of your guest VM.

Can you elaborate on the danger of DEFLATE_ON_OOM? I haven't seen any

problems

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in testing but I'd really like to know about the dangers.
Is there a difference in safety between the OOM notifier callback and the
shrinker API?

It's not about dangers as such. It's just that when linux hits OOM
all kind of error paths are being hit, latent bugs start triggering,
latency goes up drastically.

Doesn't this suggest that the shrinker is preferable to the OOM notifier in
the case that we're actually OOMing (with DEFLATE_ON_OOM)?

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    --
    Thanks,

    David / dhildenb