Re: [PATCH 2 of 5] xenpaging: map gfn before nomination

[Olaf Hering <olaf@aepfle.de>]

On Tue, Dec 06, Andres Lagar-Cavilla wrote:

> Ouch! You're absolutely tying the user space pager with the underlying xen
> paging code. Most of your patches change the tools and the hypervisor in
> lockstep.

Yes, pager and hypervisor are bound closely together.

> Patch 4 in your series is one such case. Short-cutting the state machine:
> great. But what is the gain for the hypervisor in *not* sending the
> EVICT_FAIL event. It's a good thing. It keeps the same interface to
> user-space. Xenpaging may not need it, but the Xen paging code does not
> exist solely for xenpaging.

What IS the need to send yet another request? It adds just overhead for
no obvious need. Please show the code that will benefit from the extra
EVICT_FAIL message.

> Patch 1 is also a problem. I don't buy that we can number interfaces, and
> then only support the tip ("Sorry, ENOEXEC, dig out an older hypervisor").
> Either we bite the bullet of some level of backwards compatibility with
> all its messiness, or we just keep it in flux until there is convergence
> on a major "barrier".

An out-of-tree pager can very well try to support a number of
hypervisors, perhaps patch #1 can be extended to report the age in some
way. But why would the upstream pager care about (development!) state
from the past?


> This current patch 2 is also rather gratuitous. The need to map before
> nominate feels superfluous. If Xen cannot deal with nomination requests on
> pages that have not been mapped, then we've broken Xen.

Why? It was broken (or rather: not optimal) in the first place.
Any attempt to map a gfn in any  paging state has to return -ENOENT
right away. The pager is certainly a special case, and thanks to this
change, and your change for the page-in part, the special handling can now
get removed.

> Anyway, I hope my message gets across. I'm not trying to organize a
> blockade on your code. I'm trying to get to the best possible hypervisor
> paging support we can.

Great.
Then please improve tools/xenpaging/, thats the cure for NIH.

Olaf