[PATCH 0/9] Create a userfaultfd demand paging test

Ben Gardon
2019-09-27T16:18:42Z

When handling page faults for many vCPUs during demand paging, KVM's MMU
lock becomes highly contended. This series creates a test with a naive
userfaultfd based demand paging implementation to demonstrate that
contention. This test serves both as a functional test of userfaultfd
and a microbenchmark of demand paging performance with a variable number
of vCPUs and memory per vCPU.

The test creates N userfaultfd threads, N vCPUs, and a region of memory
with M pages per vCPU. The N userfaultfd polling threads are each set up
to serve faults on a region of memory corresponding to one of the vCPUs.
Each of the vCPUs is then started, and touches each page of its disjoint
memory region, sequentially. In response to faults, the userfaultfd
threads copy a static buffer into the guest's memory. This creates a
worst case for MMU lock contention as we have removed most of the
contention between the userfaultfd threads and there is no time required
to fetch the contents of guest memory.

This test was run successfully on Intel Haswell, Broadwell, and
Cascadelake hosts with a variety of vCPU counts and memory sizes.

This test was adapted from the dirty_log_test.

The series can also be viewed in Gerrit here:
https://linux-review.googlesource.com/c/virt/kvm/kvm/+/1464
(Thanks to Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com> for setting up the Gerrit
instance)

Ben Gardon (9):
KVM: selftests: Create a demand paging test
KVM: selftests: Add demand paging content to the demand paging test
KVM: selftests: Add memory size parameter to the demand paging test
KVM: selftests: Pass args to vCPU instead of using globals
KVM: selftests: Support multiple vCPUs in demand paging test
KVM: selftests: Time guest demand paging
KVM: selftests: Add parameter to _vm_create for memslot 0 base paddr
KVM: selftests: Support large VMs in demand paging test
Add static flag

tools/testing/selftests/kvm/.gitignore | 1 +
tools/testing/selftests/kvm/Makefile | 4 +-
.../selftests/kvm/demand_paging_test.c | 610 ++++++++++++++++++
tools/testing/selftests/kvm/dirty_log_test.c | 2 +-
.../testing/selftests/kvm/include/kvm_util.h | 3 +-
tools/testing/selftests/kvm/lib/kvm_util.c | 7 +-
6 files changed, 621 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/kvm/demand_paging_test.c

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2.23.0.444.g18eeb5a265-goog