Ian Klemm 8d05407799 vmm: add memory reserve option to opt out of MAP_NORESERVE ...

Cloud Hypervisor maps guest RAM with MAP_NORESERVE, so the kernel never
reserves the backing pages at mmap time. On a host whose hugepage pool
cannot satisfy every guest, a VM is created successfully and then takes
a SIGBUS when the guest faults a page the pool can no longer back. This
is the failure mode reported in #5730 and #7387. As noted on #5730,
checking free pool headroom up front is not a reliable fix: another
process can consume pages between the check and the fault.

Add a reserve=on parameter to --memory and --memory-zone (default off,
preserving the current MAP_NORESERVE behaviour). When set, the region
is mapped without MAP_NORESERVE, so the kernel reserves the backing
pages (swap, or huge pages for hugepage-backed memory) at mmap time,
atomically with the mapping. An over-committed configuration then
fails cleanly at VM creation with an mmap ENOMEM instead of crashing
the guest later. Unlike prefault it does not fault the memory in, so
it does not slow down boot.

This mirrors QEMU's memory-backend reserve property, which has the same
name and meaning (reserve=off maps with MAP_NORESERVE). reserve is
threaded through the same mmap paths as the existing prefault option,
and is exposed in the OpenAPI schema, CLI help and docs. The top-level
--memory reserve=on path is unchanged: the default zone is synthesised
from MemoryConfig and inherits its reserve value.

Assisted-by: Claude Code (Opus 4.8)
Signed-off-by: Ian Klemm <hi@ianklemm.de>

2026-06-10 12:30:25 +00:00

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