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>
On an AMD-64 system the processor frequency that is printed during
system boot, may be different than the tsc frequency that was
returned by the hypervisor, due to the value returned from
calibrate_cpu.
For debugging timekeeping or other related issues it might be
better to get the tsc_khz value returned by the hypervisor.
The patch below now prints the tsc frequency that the VMware
hypervisor returned.
Signed-off-by: Alok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
LKML-Reference: <1252095219.12518.13.camel@ank32.eng.vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
TSC calibration is modified by the vmware hypervisor and paravirt by
separate means. Moorestown wants to add its own calibration routine as
well. So make calibrate_tsc a proper x86_init_ops function and
override it by paravirt or by the early setup of the vmware
hypervisor.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
No code changes except printk levels (although some of the K6
mtrr code might be clearer if there were a few as would
splitting out some of the intel cache code).
Signed-off-by: Alan Cox <alan@linux.intel.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Impact: fix sparse build warning
Fix the following sparse warnings:
arch/x86/kernel/cpu/vmware.c:69:5: warning: symbol 'vmware_platform'
was not declared. Should it be static?
arch/x86/kernel/cpu/vmware.c:89:15: warning: symbol
'vmware_get_tsc_khz' was not declared. Should it be static?
arch/x86/kernel/cpu/vmware.c:107:16: warning: symbol
'vmware_set_feature_bits' was not declared. Should it be static?
Signed-off-by: Hannes Eder <hannes@hanneseder.net>
Cc: "Alok N Kataria" <akataria@vmware.com>
Cc: "Dan Hecht" <dhecht@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Impact: Should permit VMware detection on older platforms where the
vendor is changed. Could theoretically cause a regression if some
weird serial number scheme contains the string "VMware" by pure
chance. Seems unlikely, especially with the mixed case.
In some user configured cases, VMware may choose not to put a VMware specific
DMI string, but the product serial key is always there and is VMware specific.
Add a interface to check the serial key, when checking for VMware in the DMI
information.
Signed-off-by: Alok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Impact: Fix possible failure to calibrate the TSC on Vmware near 4 GHz
The current version of the code to get the tsc frequency from
the VMware hypervisor, will be broken on processor with frequency
(4G-1) HZ, because on such processors eax will have UINT_MAX
and that would be legitimate.
We instead check that EBX did change to decide if we were able to
read the frequency from the hypervisor.
Signed-off-by: Alok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Impact: Changes timebase calibration on Vmware.
Use the synthetic TSC_RELIABLE bit to workaround virtualization anomalies.
Virtual TSCs can be kept nearly in sync, but because the virtual TSC
offset is set by software, it's not perfect. So, the TSC
synchronization test can fail. Even then the TSC can be used as a
clocksource since the VMware platform exports a reliable TSC to the
guest for timekeeping purposes. Use this bit to check if we need to
skip the TSC sync checks.
Along with this also set the CONSTANT_TSC bit when on VMware, since we
still want to use TSC as clocksource on VM running over hardware which
has unsynchronized TSC's (opteron's), since the hypervisor will take
care of providing consistent TSC to the guest.
Signed-off-by: Alok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: Dan Hecht <dhecht@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Impact: Changes timebase calibration on Vmware.
v3->v2 : Abstract the hypervisor detection and feature (tsc_freq) request
behind a hypervisor.c file
v2->v1 : Add a x86_hyper_vendor field to the cpuinfo_x86 structure.
This avoids multiple calls to the hypervisor detection function.
This patch adds function to detect if we are running under VMware.
The current way to check if we are on VMware is following,
# check if "hypervisor present bit" is set, if so read the 0x40000000
cpuid leaf and check for "VMwareVMware" signature.
# if the above fails, check the DMI vendors name for "VMware" string
if we find one we query the VMware hypervisor port to check if we are
under VMware.
The DMI + "VMware hypervisor port check" is needed for older VMware products,
which don't implement the hypervisor signature cpuid leaf.
Also note that since we are checking for the DMI signature the hypervisor
port should never be accessed on native hardware.
This patch also adds a hypervisor_get_tsc_freq function, instead of
calibrating the frequency which can be error prone in virtualized
environment, we ask the hypervisor for it. We get the frequency from
the hypervisor by accessing the hypervisor port if we are running on VMware.
Other hypervisors too can add code to the generic routine to get frequency on
their platform.
Signed-off-by: Alok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: Dan Hecht <dhecht@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
