This patch introduces two in-kernel drivers for Xen transcendent memory
("tmem") functionality that complement cleancache and frontswap. Both
use control theory to dynamically adjust and optimize memory utilization.
Selfballooning controls the in-kernel Xen balloon driver, targeting a goal
value (vm_committed_as), thus pushing less frequently used clean
page cache pages (through the cleancache code) into Xen tmem where
Xen can balance needs across all VMs residing on the physical machine.
Frontswap-selfshrinking controls the number of pages in frontswap,
driving it towards zero (effectively doing a partial swapoff) when
in-kernel memory pressure subsides, freeing up RAM for other VMs.
More detail is provided in the header comment of xen-selfballooning.c.
Signed-off-by: Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com>
[v8: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: set default enablement depending on frontswap]
[v7: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: fix capitalization and punctuation in comments]
[v6: fix frontswap-selfshrinking initialization]
[v6: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: fix init pr_infos; add comments about swap]
[v5: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: add NULL to attr list; move inits up to decls]
[v4: dkiper@net-space.pl: use strict_strtoul plus a few syntactic nits]
[v3: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: fix potential divides-by-zero]
[v3: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: add many more comments, fix nits]
[v2: rebased to linux-3.0-rc1]
[v2: Ian.Campbell@citrix.com: reorganize as new file (xen-selfballoon.c)]
[v2: dkiper@net-space.pl: proper access to vm_committed_as]
[v2: dkiper@net-space.pl: accounting fixes]
Cc: Jan Beulich <JBeulich@novell.com>
Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Cc: <xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
The basic functionality of ballooning pages is useful for Xen drivers in
general. Rather than require a dependency on the balloon module, split
the functionality that is reused into the core. The balloon module is
still required to follow ballooning requests from xenstore or to view
balloon statistics in sysfs.
Acked-by: Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Daniel De Graaf <dgdegra@tycho.nsa.gov>
Signed-off-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Dan Magenheimer