Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 3/3] xen: eliminate scalability issues from initial mapping setup

[David Vrabel <david.vrabel@citrix.com>]

On 04/09/14 15:31, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> On 04.09.14 at 15:02, <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com> wrote:
>> On 04/09/14 13:59, David Vrabel wrote:
>>> On 04/09/14 13:38, Juergen Gross wrote:
>>>> Direct Xen to place the initial P->M table outside of the initial
>>>> mapping, as otherwise the 1G (implementation) / 2G (theoretical)
>>>> restriction on the size of the initial mapping limits the amount
>>>> of memory a domain can be handed initially.
>>> The three level p2m limits memory to 512 GiB on x86-64 but this patch
>>> doesn't seem to address this limit and thus seems a bit useless to me.
>>
>> Any increase of the p2m beyond 3 levels will need to come with
>> substantial libxc changes first.  3 level p2ms are hard coded throughout
>> all the PV build and migrate code.
> 
> No, there no such dependency - the kernel could use 4 levels at
> any time (sacrificing being able to get migrated), making sure it
> only exposes the 3 levels hanging off the fourth level (or not
> exposing this information at all) to external entities making this
> wrong assumption.

I don't think we want a kernel that may or may not be saved or migrated
based on how much memory it has.

Nor do we want a kernel that has even more differences between dom0 and
domU.

David