From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Avi Kivity Subject: [PATCH] KVM: MMU: Document large pages Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 16:44:12 +0300 Message-ID: <1274967852-31886-1-git-send-email-avi@redhat.com> Cc: kvm@vger.kernel.org To: Xiao Guangrong , Marcelo Tosatti Return-path: Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:31988 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751100Ab0E0NoR (ORCPT ); Thu, 27 May 2010 09:44:17 -0400 Sender: kvm-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity --- 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