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From: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
To: Xiao Guangrong <xiaoguangrong@cn.fujitsu.com>,
	Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: kvm@vger.kernel.org
Subject: [PATCH] KVM: MMU: Document large pages
Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 16:44:12 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1274967852-31886-1-git-send-email-avi@redhat.com> (raw)

Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
---
 Documentation/kvm/mmu.txt |   23 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 files changed, 23 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/kvm/mmu.txt b/Documentation/kvm/mmu.txt
index 1e7ecdd..6a0cab2 100644
--- a/Documentation/kvm/mmu.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kvm/mmu.txt
@@ -317,6 +317,29 @@ on fault type:
 
 (user write faults generate a #PF)
 
+Large pages
+===========
+
+The mmu supports all combinations of large and small guest and host pages.
+Supported page sizes include 4k, 2M, 4M, and 1G.  4M pages are treated as
+two separate 2M pages, on both guest and host, since the mmu always uses PAE
+paging.
+
+To instantiate a large spte, four constraints must be satisfied:
+
+- the spte must point to a large host page
+- the guest pte must be a large pte of at least equivalent size (if tdp is
+  enabled, there is no guest pte and this condition is satisified)
+- if the spte will be writeable, the large page frame may not overlap any
+  write-protected pages
+- the guest guest pte must be wholly contained by a single memory slot
+
+To check the last two conditions, the mmu maintains a ->write_count set of
+arrays for each memory slot and large page size.  Every write protected page
+causes its write_count to be incremented, thus preventing instantiation of
+a large spte.  The frames at the end of an unaligned memory slot have
+artificically inflated ->write_counts so they can never be instantiated.
+
 Further reading
 ===============
 
-- 
1.7.1


             reply	other threads:[~2010-05-27 13:44 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-05-27 13:44 Avi Kivity [this message]
2010-06-01 19:33 ` [PATCH] KVM: MMU: Document large pages Marcelo Tosatti

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