Hi David, Indeed, both directions are very exciting. virtio-pmem avoids duplicated page-cache residency, while DAMON with free-page reporting provides a practical path to reclaim cold guest memory and return it to the host.
This connects closely with the work we are already doing. We are continuing to improve our DAMON-based experiments, and we would also like to explore how DAMON-based memory reclamation can be coordinated with broader CPU and resource monitoring. At LPC, I plan to bring detailed data and discuss the follow-up design with everyone. I hope we can turn this into an executable milestone, bring the related ideas together, and try more scenarios as a community. Everything looks very encouraging and gives us much to look forward to. With SJ helping coordinate the broader roadmap and everyone contributing, I am confident that we will achieve many more exciting results. Kernel work like this can continue making the world better. Thanks, Lian On Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:04:41 +0200 "David Hildenbrand (Arm)" <[email protected]> wrote: > Free-page reporting makes much more sense. > > When I was at RH we were looking at this issue as well. virtio-pmem was one > way of avoiding the page cache in VM entirely. But it has its own limitations.
