Re: [PATCH] export notifier #1

Andrea Arcangeli
2008-01-24T12:26:23Z

On Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 07:56:43AM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
> What I need is a list of (mm, va) that map the page. kvm doesn't have
> access to that, export notifiers do. It seems reasonable that export
> notifier do that rmap walk since they are part of core mm, not kvm.

Yes. Like said in earlier email we could ignore the slowdown and
duplicate the mm/rmap.c code inside kvm, but that looks a bad layering
violation and it's unnecessary, dirty and suboptimal IMHO.

> Alternatively, kvm can change its internal rmap structure to be page based
> instead of (mm, hva) based. The problem here is to size this thing, as we
> don't know in advance (when the kvm module is loaded) whether 0% or 100%
> (or some value in between) of system memory will be used for kvm.

Another issue is that for things like the page sharing driver, it's
more convenient to be able to know exactly which "sptes" belongs to a
certain userland mapping, and only that userland mapping (not all
others mappings of the physical page). So if the rmap becomes page
based, it'd be nice to still be able to find the "mm" associated with
that certain spte pointer to skip all sptes in the other "mm" during
the invalidate.