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I have two questions regarding the ESXi balloon driver.

  1. When the driver inflates on a VM, what keeps the guest OS from page file swapping the ballooned memory?

  2. How does ESXi know which host physical memory addresses become available due to balloon inflation?

Derek
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  • Kind of dated, but I believe the ballooning section is helpful for understanding the concept: https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/perf-vsphere-memory_management.pdf – Håkan Lindqvist Jul 18 '19 at 20:18
  • In particular, see page 8: "Here, “pinning” is achieved through the guest operating system interface, which ensures that the pinned pages cannot be paged out to disk under any circumstances. Once the memory is allocated, the balloon driver notifies the hypervisor the page numbers of the pinned guest physical memory so that the hypervisor can reclaim the host physical pages that are backing them." – Harry Johnston Jul 19 '19 at 00:53

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