Re: [RFC PATCH 1/1] Move two pinned pages to non-movable node in kvm.

Marcelo Tosatti
2014-06-19T19:00:24Z

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 12:20:32PM +0300, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> CCing Marcelo,
>
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 02:50:44PM +0800, Tang Chen wrote:
> > Hi Gleb,
> >
> > Thanks for the quick reply. Please see below.
> >
> > On 06/18/2014 02:12 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> > >On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 01:50:00PM +0800, Tang Chen wrote:
> > >>[Questions]
> > >>And by the way, would you guys please answer the following questions for me ?
> > >>
> > >>1. What's the ept identity pagetable for ? Only one page is enough ?
> > >>
> > >>2. Is the ept identity pagetable only used in realmode ?
> > >> Can we free it once the guest is up (vcpu in protect mode)?
> > >>
> > >>3. Now, ept identity pagetable is allocated in qemu userspace.
> > >> Can we allocate it in kernel space ?
> > >What would be the benefit?
> >
> > I think the benefit is we can hot-remove the host memory a kvm guest
> > is using.
> >
> > For now, only memory in ZONE_MOVABLE can be migrated/hot-removed. And the
> > kernel
> > will never use ZONE_MOVABLE memory. So if we can allocate these two pages in
> > kernel space, we can pin them without any trouble. When doing memory
> > hot-remove,
> > the kernel will not try to migrate these two pages.
> But we can do that by other means, no? The patch you've sent for instance.
>
> >
> > >
> > >>
> > >>4. If I want to migrate these two pages, what do you think is the best way ?
> > >>
> > >I answered most of those here: http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm@vger.kernel.org/msg103718.html
> >
> > I'm sorry I must missed this email.
> >
> > Seeing your advice, we can unpin these two pages and repin them in the next
> > EPT violation.
> > So about this problem, which solution would you prefer, allocate these two
> > pages in kernel
> > space, or migrate them before memory hot-remove ?
> >
> > I think the first solution is simpler. But I'm not quite sure if there is
> > any other pages
> > pinned in memory. If we have the same problem with other kvm pages, I think
> > it is better to
> > solve it in the second way.
> >
> > What do you think ?
> Remove pinning is preferable. In fact looks like for identity pagetable
> it should be trivial, just don't pin. APIC access page is a little bit
> more complicated since its physical address needs to be tracked to be
> updated in VMCS.

Yes, and there are new users of page pinning as well soon (see PEBS
threads on kvm-devel).

Was thinking of notifiers scheme. Perhaps:

->begin_page_unpin(struct page *page)
- Remove any possible access to page.

->end_page_unpin(struct page *page)
- Reinstantiate any possible access to page.

For KVM:

->begin_page_unpin()
- Remove APIC-access page address from VMCS.
or
- Remove spte translation to pinned page.

- Put vcpu in state where no VM-entries are allowed.

->end_page_unpin()
- Setup APIC-access page, ...
- Allow vcpu to VM-entry.

Because allocating APIC access page from distant NUMA node can
be a performance problem, i believe.

I'd be happy to know why notifiers are overkill.