vmmemctl (balloon) driver

[John H. D. I. <jo...@ar...>]

I've created an implementation of the memory balloon driver for SCO OpenServer.
Communication via the back door appears to be working, in that the startup
succeeds and the target queries return success (that is, ax comes back 0, which
is not the case when I test it on bare metal).  However, the balloon target is
always returned as 0.  I've tried various things to attempt to trigger
inflation, e.g. touching most of the guest's memory and then consuming memory
outside of the guest, with no luck.  I tried returning a guest type of
BALLOON_GUEST_SOLARIS instead of BALLOON_GUEST_UNKNOWN in case it makes a
difference, with no change.  I'm testing this under Workstation 6.5.3 and ESX
3.5.

Example status report:

target:                    0 pages
current:                   0 pages
rateNoSleepAlloc:      16384 pages/sec
rateSleepAlloc:         2048 pages/sec
rateFree:              16384 pages/sec

timer:                  1507
start:                     1 (   0 failed)
guestType:                 1 (   0 failed)
lock:                      0 (   0 failed)
unlock:                    0 (   0 failed)
target:                 1507 (   0 failed)
primNoSleepAlloc:          0 (   0 failed)
primCanSleepAlloc:         0 (   0 failed)
primFree:                  0
errAlloc:                  0
errFree:                   0

Some questions:

- Does ballooning work under Workstation?
- What can I do that will be guaranteed to provoke balloon inflation?
- Is there something obvious I'm missing?

thanks,

	John
-- 
John DuBois  sp...@ar...  KC6QKZ/AE  http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/