Re: vmmemctl (balloon) driver

[Shaileshkumar J. <sa...@vm...>]

John H. DuBois III wrote:
> 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?
>   
Yes.

> - What can I do that will be guaranteed to provoke balloon inflation?
>   
For ESX.
a) Run 2 VMs with ~1.5x overcommit. For instance if your host has 4GB of 
memory, you can assign each VM 3GB.

b) Run memory intensive workload (memhog), that touches ~75% of memory 
in one VM. You should see target != 0.

You can try above experiment in different config, for eg. assigning less 
memory where you plan to run intensive workload, so as to see ballooning 
taking place..

> - Is there something obvious I'm missing?
>
> thanks,
>
> 	John
>   

Shailesh Jain