O VMWARE_BALLOON (opção de kernel do Linux) é destinado a guests ou hosts?

Question

A opção de configuração do kernel:

VMware Balloon Driver (VMWARE_BALLOON) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) ?

CONFIG_VMWARE_BALLOON:

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 vmw_balloon.

Symbol: VMWARE_BALLOON [=n]
Type  : tristate
Prompt: VMware Balloon Driver
  Defined at drivers/misc/Kconfig:428
  Depends on: X86 [=y]  
  Location:
    -> Device Drivers
      -> Misc devices

Não está totalmente claro, mas parece que isso deve ser definido no kernel do sistema operacional convidado, e não no host. Está certo?

    

Answer 1

Sim, destina-se a ser executado no SO convidado.

A small balloon module is loaded into the guest OS as a pseudo-device driver or kernel service. It has no external interface within the guest, and communicates with ESX Server via a private channel. When the server wants to reclaim memory, it instructs the driver to inflate'' by allocating pinned physical pages within the VM, using appropriate native interfaces. Similarly, the server maydeflate'' the balloon by instructing it to deallocate previously-allocated pages.

(...)

Our balloon drivers for the Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows operating systems poll the server once per second to obtain a target balloon size, and they limit their allocation rates adaptively to avoid stressing the guest OS.

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