Re: [PATCH 0/5] x86: properly propagate errors to hypercall callee

[Keir Fraser <keir.xen@gmail.com>]

On 09/03/2011 10:53, "Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@novell.com> wrote:

> This patch set makes it so that not only the offending BUG() gets
> eliminated, but also properly propagates the error to the guest,
> so that the latter can take action (which will itself require quite
> some changes to prevent crashing the guest in that situation,
> particularly where utilizing Xen's writeable page table support).

Presumably this is from shattering superpage mappings when per-page cache
attributes change in response to a guest mapping a page with, for example,
non-WB attributes?

It seems unfortunate to propagate this to guests. Perhaps we should be
making a memory pool for Xen's 1:1 mappings, big enough to allow a 4kB
mapping of every page of RAM in the system, and allocate/free pagetables to
that pool? The overhead of this would be no more than 0.2% of system memory,
which seems reasonable to avoid an error case that is surely hard for a
guest to react to or fix.

An alternative might be to replace the x86_64 1:1 mapping with a mapping
cache. Could be transparent, demand faulting in parts of the 1:1 mapping.
But that seems a pain, possibly difficult for demand faults from IRQ
context, when the alternative is only a 0.2% space cost.

 -- Keir