virtio-balloon-device locks up Guest Setting arbitrary balloon target values locks up the guest in some cases crashes it, if the target memory is < used +~5% free. Found while testing aggressive memory over-commit, scenarios. You get messages like: [ 155.827448] [] (show_stack) from [] (dump_stack+0x6c/0x88) [ 155.837076] [] (dump_stack) from [] (warn_alloc_failed+0xe0/0x120) [ 155.847075] [] (warn_alloc_failed) from [] (__alloc_pages_nodemask+0x600/0x91c) [ 155.859039] [] (__alloc_pages_nodemask) from [] (balloon_page_enqueue+0x20/0xbc) [ 155.870556] [] (balloon_page_enqueue) from [] (balloon+0x140/0x2cc) [ 155.881377] [] (balloon) from [] (kthread+0xd8/0xf4) page dumped bacause: nonzero _count BUG: BAad page state in process Xorg pfn:396e5 Test Environment: x86_64 Ubuntu 13.10, Guest Linux Kernel 3.19, qemu 2.2.0 with following patches applied - balloon OOM enhancement commit 5a10b7dbf904bfe01bb9fcc6298f7df09eed77d5 Author: Raushaniya Maksudova