Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC 5/5] virtio-balloon: Safely handle BALLOON_PAGE_SIZE < host page size

[David Hildenbrand]

>>>>> I can see why, but I really can't see what else to do without breaking
>>>>> existing, supported, working (albeit by accident) setups.
>>>>
>>>> Is there any reason to use this more complicated "allow random freeing"
>>>> approach over a simplistic sequential freeing I propose? Then we can
>>>> simply migrate the last freed page and should be fine.
>>>
>>> Well.. your approach is probably simpler in terms of the calculations
>>> that need to be done, though only very slightly.  I think my approach
>>> is conceptually clearer though, since we're explicitly checking for
>>> exactly the condition we need, rather than something we thing should
>>> match up with that condition.
>>
>> I prefer to keep it simple where possible. We expect sequential freeing,
>> so it's easy to implement with only one additional uint64_t that can be
>> easily migrated. Having to use bitmaps + alloc/free is not really needed.
>>
>> If you insist, at least try to get rid of the malloc to e.g. simplify
>> migration.
> 
> I don't think there's really anything to do for migration; we already
> effectively lose the state of the balloon across migration.  I think
> it's fine to lose a little extra transitional state.

Yeah, I guess it would only make sense when trying to avoid misleading
warnings (depending on which approach you'll use for when to report
warnings).

-- 

Thanks,

David / dhildenb