[CentOS-virt] xen_balloon: reserve_additional_memory: add_memory() Errors

[David Vrabel]

On 03/01/14 19:58, Chris Elliott wrote:
> Hi All
> 
>  
> 
> Back in August there was a report of these errors popping up in dmesg,
> and as far as I can tell it’s still unresolved even in the latest kernel.
> 
> System RAM resource [mem 0xc8000000-0xcfffffff] cannot be added
> xen_balloon: reserve_additional_memory: add_memory() failed: -17

Drivers (e.g., blkback) use ballooned pages for use for foreign
mappings.  Depending on dom0_mem options there may be no ballooned
memory available at boot and dom0's balloon is increased by allocating
pages.  This decreases current_kb.

The balloon driver then tries to decrease the balloon to match the
target but it can only do this by hotplugging new memory.  A bug in the
balloon driver means the location of this memory overlaps with an
address range that is already in use and the hotplug will fail.

As a workaround you can boot dom0 with a suitable amount of
pre-ballooned memory with:

   dom0_mem=3G,max:4G

You may need to experiment with the max: value.

David