virtio-mem: paravirtualized memory hot(un)plug
David Hildenbrand, Martin Schulz · 2021
The ability to dynamically increase or reduce the amount of memory available to a virtual machine is getting increasingly important: as one example, cloud users want to dynamically adjust the memory assigned to their virtual machines to optimize costs. Traditional memory hot(un)plug, such as hot(un)plugging emulated DIMMs, and memory ballooning can dynamically resize virtual machine memory. However, existing approaches provide limited flexibility, are incompatible with important technologies like vNUMA and fast operating system reboots, or are unsuitable when hosting untrusted virtual machines.