Wei Wang authored Aug 16, 2018 and Michael S. Tsirkin committed Aug 22, 2018

The OOM notifier is getting deprecated to use for the reasons:
- As a callout from the oom context, it is too subtle and easy to
  generate bugs and corner cases which are hard to track;
- It is called too late (after the reclaiming has been performed).
  Drivers with large amuont of reclaimable memory is expected to
  release them at an early stage of memory pressure;
- The notifier callback isn't aware of oom contrains;
Link: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/7/12/314



This patch replaces the virtio-balloon oom notifier with a shrinker
to release balloon pages on memory pressure. The balloon pages are
given back to mm adaptively by returning the number of pages that the
reclaimer is asking for (i.e. sc->nr_to_scan).

Currently the max possible value of sc->nr_to_scan passed to the balloon
shrinker is SHRINK_BATCH, which is 128. This is smaller than the
limitation that only VIRTIO_BALLOON_ARRAY_PFNS_MAX (256) pages can be
returned via one invocation of leak_balloon. But this patch still
considers the case that SHRINK_BATCH or shrinker->batch could be changed
to a value larger than VIRTIO_BALLOON_ARRAY_PFNS_MAX, which will need to
do multiple invocations of leak_balloon.

Historically, the feature VIRTIO_BALLOON_F_DEFLATE_ON_OOM has been used
to release balloon pages on OOM. We continue to use this feature bit for
the shrinker, so the shrinker is only registered when this feature bit
has been negotiated with host.

Signed-off-by: Wei Wang <wei.w.wang@intel.com>
Cc: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>