Re: [PATCH] export notifier #1

Avi Kivity
2008-01-24T05:56:43Z

Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Robin Holt wrote:
>
>
>>> That won't work for kvm. If we have a hundred virtual machines, that means
>>> 99 no-op notifications.
>>>
>> But 100 callouts holding spinlocks will not work for our implementation
>> and even if the callouts are made with spinlocks released, we would very
>> strongly prefer a single callout which messages the range to the other
>> side.
>>
>
>
> Andrea wont have 99 no op notifications. You will have one notification to
> the kvm subsystem (since there needs to be only one register operation
> for a subsystem that wants to get notifications). What do you do there is
> up to kvm. If you want to call some function 99 times then you are free to
> do that.
>

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.

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.

--
Any sufficiently difficult bug is indistinguishable from a feature.