Re: [PATCH kernel v5 0/5] Extend virtio-balloon for fast (de)inflating & fast live migration

[Dave Hansen]

Removing silly virtio-dev@ list because it's bouncing mail...

On 12/07/2016 08:21 AM, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>> Li's current patches do that.  Well, maybe not pfn/length, but they do
>> take a pfn and page-order, which fits perfectly with the kernel's
>> concept of high-order pages.
> 
> So we can send length in powers of two. Still, I don't see any benefit
> over a simple pfn/len schema. But I'll have a more detailed look at the
> implementation first, maybe that will enlighten me :)

It is more space-efficient.  We're fitting the order into 6 bits, which
would allows the full 2^64 address space to be represented in one entry,
and leaves room for the bitmap size to be encoded as well, if we decide
we need a bitmap in the future.

If that was purely a length, we'd be limited to 64*4k pages per entry,
which isn't even a full large page.