[Xen-devel] Re: [PATCH] Balloon driver crash

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>]

On 06/08/2010 11:08 AM, M A Young wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Jun 2010, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
>
>> On 06/08/2010 02:25 AM, M A Young wrote:
>>> This patch fixes an error in commit
>>> f4685d0ed041523d1bd5124c5872459681aca876
>>> "Add hugepage support to balloon driver" that was causing the balloon
>>> driver to crash when shrinking the memory used by Domain-0.
>>
>> Thanks.  But why haven't I seen this?
>
> Good question, but I think you only see the crash in a limited memory
> situation. I don't claim to be an expert in what is going on, but a
> few lines earlier you have the the loop
>
>         for (i = 0; i < nr_pages; i++) {
>                 if ((page = alloc_pages(GFP_BALLOON, balloon_order))
> == NULL) {
>                         nr_pages = i;
>                         need_sleep = 1;
>                         break;
>                 }
>
>                 pfn = page_to_pfn(page);
>                 frame_list[i] = pfn_to_mfn(pfn);
>
>                 scrub_page(page);
>         }
>
> If alloc_pages(GFP_BALLOON, balloon_order) is never NULL during the
> loop then page is left set to be one of the pages you are freeing.
> From then on PageHighMem(pfn_to_page(lpfn)) and PageHighMem(page)
> could easily the same and you will only have a problem if some of the
> pages you are freeing are PageHighMem and some aren't.
>
> If alloc_pages(GFP_BALLOON, balloon_order) is null somewhere in the
> loop (presumably because it can't find enough pages to free) then the
> process will crash.

I think the short answer is that I always run 64-bit dom0, so there's no
highmem...

    J

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