On 2011-05-17 09:52, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com> writes:
> 
>> On 2011-05-16 09:28, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>>> On 05/13/11 16:18, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>>>> VGA, cirrus-vga and vmware-svga do.  Gerd, you added it (commit
>>>> a19cbfb3), care to explain?
>>>
>>> Just forgot to add it to the list when merging.
>>> I'll go stuff a patch into the spice patch queue.
>>>
>>> Does "-device VGA" work these days btw?
>>> Last time I tries it didn't due to some init order issues.
>>
>> I've (mostly) fixed the PAM/SMRAM stuff that still breaks this. Will
>> post the series soon.
> 
> Good to know, thanks!

I'm afraid I was too optimistic. Further testing revealed a regression
of my series which is fundamentally coupled to the QEMU limitation of
tracking the physical memory mapping at page level: even with lots of
hacks applied, KVM runs out of slots in certain setups when replaying
the original memory mapping from the i440fx cache.

Yes, I could hack the third slot tracking algorithm, now into the i440fx
code, but that appears to be completely. I think we better finally
renovate that QEMU area, simplifying KVM and vhost memory clients,
allowing for correct PAM/SMRAM emulation without hacks, and ideally also
saving tons of memory by reducing the number of PhysPageDesc
(specifically with multi-GB guest memory - something the PhysPageDesc
tree was not designed for).

If anyone has good design ideas in mind or some helping hands free,
please speak up!

Jan