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>

1 files changed, 16 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/misc/Kconfig b/drivers/misc/Kconfig
index 2191c8d896a0..0d0d625fece2 100644
--- a/drivers/misc/Kconfig
+++ b/drivers/misc/Kconfig
@@ -311,6 +311,22 @@ config TI_DAC7512
 	  This driver can also be built as a module. If so, the module
 	  will be calles ti_dac7512.
 
+config VMWARE_BALLOON
+	tristate "VMware Balloon Driver"
+	depends on X86
+	help
+	  This is VMware physical memory management driver which acts
+	  like a "balloon" that can be inflated to reclaim physical pages
+	  by reserving them in the guest and invalidating them in the
+	  monitor, freeing up the underlying machine pages so they can
+	  be allocated to other guests. The balloon can also be deflated
+	  to allow the guest to use more physical memory.
+
+	  If unsure, say N.
+
+	  To compile this driver as a module, choose M here: the
+	  module will be called vmware_balloon.
+
 source "drivers/misc/c2port/Kconfig"
 source "drivers/misc/eeprom/Kconfig"
 source "drivers/misc/cb710/Kconfig"