Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 1/1] virtio-mmio: return the max queue num of virtio-mmio with initial value

[Peter Maydell]

On 16 July 2015 at 19:38, Wei Huang <address@hidden> wrote:
> Recently we found that virtio-console devices consumes lots AArch64 guest
> memory, roughly 1GB with 8 devices. After debugging, it turns out that lots
> of factors contribute to this problem: i) guest PAGE_SIZE=64KB, ii)
> virtio-mmio based devices, and iii) virtio-console device. Here is the
> detailed analysis:
>
> 1. First, during initialization, virtio-mmio driver in guest pokes vq
>    size by reading VIRTIO_MMIO_QUEUE_NUM_MAX (see virtio_mmio.c file).
> 2. QEMU returns VIRTQUEUE_MAX_SIZE (1024) to guest VM; And virtio-mmio uses
>    it as the default vq size.
> 3. virtio-console driver allocates vring buffers based on this value (see
>    add_inbuf() function of virtio_console.c file). Because PAGE_SIZE=64KB,
>    ~64MB is allocated for each virtio-console vq.
>
> This patch addresses the problem by returning the iniatlized vring size
> when VM queries QEMU about VIRTIO_MMIO_QUEUE_NUM_MAX. This is similar to
> virtio-pci's approach. By doing this, the vq memory consumption is reduced
> substantially.

I don't know if this patch is sensible to apply anyway, but from
this description this really sounds like a guest kernel bug.
QEMU tells the kernel the maximum queue size it can cope with,
and if the guest kernel cares about not using insane amounts of
RAM on queues then it should not blindly use the maximum size
but restrict it itself...

thanks
-- PMM