linux/arch
Dmitry Torokhov 453dc65931 VMware Balloon driver
This is a standalone version of VMware Balloon driver.  Ballooning is a
technique that allows hypervisor dynamically limit the amount of memory
available to the guest (with guest cooperation).  In the overcommit
scenario, when hypervisor set detects that it needs to shuffle some
memory, it instructs the driver to allocate certain number of pages, and
the underlying memory gets returned to the hypervisor.  Later hypervisor
may return memory to the guest by reattaching memory to the pageframes and
instructing the driver to "deflate" balloon.

We are submitting a standalone driver because KVM maintainer (Avi Kivity)
expressed opinion (rightly) that our transport does not fit well into
virtqueue paradigm and thus it does not make much sense to integrate with
virtio.

There were also some concerns whether current ballooning technique is the
right thing.  If there appears a better framework to achieve this we are
prepared to evaluate and switch to using it, but in the meantime we'd like
to get this driver upstream.

We want to get the driver accepted in distributions so that users do not
have to deal with an out-of-tree module and many distributions have
"upstream first" requirement.

The driver has been shipping for a number of years and users running on
VMware platform will have it installed as part of VMware Tools even if it
will not come from a distribution, thus there should not be additional
risk in pulling the driver into mainline.  The driver will only activate
if host is VMware so everyone else should not be affected at all.

Signed-off-by: Dmitry Torokhov <dtor@vmware.com>
Cc: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-04-24 11:31:26 -07:00
..
alpha include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
arm ARM: 5974/1: arm/mach-at91 Makefile: remove two blanks. 2010-04-14 11:22:44 +01:00
avr32 include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
blackfin include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
cris include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
frv frv: fix kernel/user segment handling in NOMMU mode 2010-04-07 08:38:05 -07:00
h8300 include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
ia64 KVM: fix the handling of dirty bitmaps to avoid overflows 2010-04-20 13:06:55 +03:00
m32r include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
m68k m68knommu: fix coldfire tcdrain 2010-04-21 13:43:06 +10:00
m68knommu m68knommu: remove a duplicate vector setting line for 68360 2010-04-21 13:43:06 +10:00
microblaze microblaze: Remove unused variable from ptrace 2010-04-07 15:47:55 +02:00
mips MIPS: Calculate proper ebase value for 64-bit kernels 2010-04-12 17:26:22 +01:00
mn10300 include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
parisc include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
powerpc KVM: fix the handling of dirty bitmaps to avoid overflows 2010-04-20 13:06:55 +03:00
s390 [S390] vdso: use ntp adjusted clock multiplier 2010-04-22 17:17:19 +02:00
score include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
sh Merge branch 'master' into export-slabh 2010-04-05 11:37:28 +09:00
sparc sparc64: Fix hardirq tracing in trap return path. 2010-04-20 00:48:37 -07:00
um uml: Fix build breakage after slab.h changes 2010-04-19 17:46:23 +09:00
x86 VMware Balloon driver 2010-04-24 11:31:26 -07:00
xtensa include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
.gitignore
Kconfig Merge branch 'perf-probes-for-linus-2' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2010-03-05 10:50:22 -08:00