Re: [Xen-devel] PV Shim ballooning

[Igor Druzhinin <igor.druzhinin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/02/2020 13:39, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> Ballooning inside PV shim is currently very broken.
> 
> From an instrumented Xen and 32bit PV XTF test:
> 
> (d3) (d3) --- Xen Test Framework ---
> (d3) (d3) Ballooning: PV 32bit (PAE 3 levels)
> (d3) (d3) mr { 0010a940, 1024, 0x7ff0 }
> (d3) (d3) About to decrease
> (d3) (XEN) *** D { ffff820080000020, nr 1020, done 0 }
> (d3) (XEN) d3v0 failed to reserve 267 extents of order 0 for offlining
> (d3) (XEN) *** D { ffff82007fffe040, nr 1024, done 1020 }
> (d3) (XEN) d3v0 failed to reserve 1024 extents of order 0 for offlining
> (d3) (d3) => got 1024
> 
> This test takes 1024 frames and calls decrease reservation on them,
> before unmapping.  i.e. the decrease reservation should fail.  Shim
> successfully offlines 753 pages (nothing to do with the frames the guest
> selected), and fails to offline 1291, and despite this, returns success.
> 
> First of all, the "failed to reserve" is in pv_shim_offline_memory()
> which is a void function that has a semantically relevant failure case. 
> This obviously isn't ok.
> 
> Second, the way the compat code loops over the translated data is
> incompatible with how args.nr_done is used for the call into
> pv_shim_offline_memory().
> 
> Why is pv_shim_offline_memory() not in decrease_reservation() to begin with?

Could be moved assuming it will just offline the frames that already processed.

> Furthermore, there is a fundamental difference in ballooning behaviour
> between PV and HVM guests, which I don't think we can compensate for. 
> PV guests need to call decrease reservation once to release the frames,
> and unmap the frames (in any order).  HVM guests calling decrease
> reservation automatically make the frame unusable no matter how many
> outstanding references exist.
> 
> Shim can't decrease reservation (HVM with L0 Xen) on any frame who's
> reference count didn't drop to 0 from the PV guests' call, and there is
> nothing presently to check this condition.

It will allocated the pages from allocator - yes, it checks that counter
is dropped to 0.

Igor

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