Re: [PATCH] KVM: x86: fix vcpu->mmio_fragments overflow

[Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>]

On 2012-10-22 15:08, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 03:05:58PM +0200, Jan Kiszka wrote:
>> On 2012-10-22 14:58, Avi Kivity wrote:
>>> On 10/22/2012 02:55 PM, Jan Kiszka wrote:
>>>>> Since the userspace change is needed the idea is dead, but if we could
>>>>> implement it I do not see how it can hurt the latency if it would be the
>>>>> only mechanism to use coalesced mmio buffer. Checking that the ring buffer
>>>>> is empty is cheap and if it is not empty it means that kernel just saved
>>>>> you a lot of 8 bytes exists so even after iterating over all the entries there
>>>>> you still saved a lot of time.
>>>>
>>>> When taking an exit for A, I'm not interesting in flushing stuff for B
>>>> unless I have a dependency. Thus, buffers would have to be per device
>>>> before extending their use.
>>>
>>> Any mmio exit has to flush everything.  For example a DMA caused by an
>>> e1000 write has to see any writes to the framebuffer, in case the guest
>>> is transmitting its framebuffer to the outside world.
>>
>> We already flush when that crazy guest actually accesses the region, no
>> need to do this unconditionally.
>>
> What if framebuffer is accessed from inside the kernel? Is this case handled?

Unless I miss a case now, there is no direct access to the framebuffer
possible when we are also doing coalescing. Everything needs to go
through userspace.

Jan

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