Re: [PATCH RFC 04/15] KVM: Implement ring-based dirty memory tracking

Paolo Bonzini
2019-12-10T17:09:13Z

On 10/12/19 16:52, Peter Xu wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 11:07:31AM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>>> I'm thinking whether I can start
>>> to use this information in the next post on solving an issue I
>>> encountered with the waitqueue.
>>>
>>> Current waitqueue is still problematic in that it could wait even with
>>> the mmu lock held when with vcpu context.
>>
>> I think the idea of the soft limit is that the waiting just cannot
>> happen. That is, the number of dirtied pages _outside_ the guest (guest
>> accesses are taken care of by PML, and are subtracted from the soft
>> limit) cannot exceed hard_limit - (soft_limit + pml_size).
>
> So the question go backs to, whether this is guaranteed somehow? Or
> do you prefer us to keep the warn_on_once until it triggers then we
> can analyze (which I doubt..)?

Yes, I would like to keep the WARN_ON_ONCE just because you never know.

Of course it would be much better to audit the calls to kvm_write_guest
and figure out how many could trigger (e.g. two from the operands of an
emulated instruction, 5 from a nested EPT walk, 1 from a page walk, etc.).

> One thing to mention is that for with-vcpu cases, we probably can even
> stop KVM_RUN immediately as long as either the per-vm or per-vcpu ring
> reaches the softlimit, then for vcpu case it should be easier to
> guarantee that. What I want to know is the rest of cases like ioctls
> or even something not from the userspace (which I think I should read
> more later..).

Which ioctls? Most ioctls shouldn't dirty memory at all.

>>> And if we see if the mark_page_dirty_in_slot() is not with a vcpu
>>> context (e.g. kvm_mmu_page_fault) but with an ioctl context (those
>>> cases we'll use per-vm dirty ring) then it's probably fine.
>>>
>>> My planned solution:
>>>
>>> - When kvm_get_running_vcpu() != NULL, we postpone the waitqueue waits
>>> until we finished handling this page fault, probably in somewhere
>>> around vcpu_enter_guest, so that we can do wait_event() after the
>>> mmu lock released
>>
>> I think this can cause a race:
>>
>> vCPU 1 vCPU 2 host
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>> mark page dirty
>> write to page
>> treat page as not dirty
>> add page to ring
>>
>> where vCPU 2 skips the clean-page slow path entirely.
>
> If we're still with the rule in userspace that we first do RESET then
> collect and send the pages (just like what we've discussed before),
> then IMHO it's fine to have vcpu2 to skip the slow path? Because
> RESET happens at "treat page as not dirty", then if we are sure that
> we only collect and send pages after that point, then the latest
> "write to page" data from vcpu2 won't be lost even if vcpu2 is not
> blocked by vcpu1's ring full?

Good point, the race would become

vCPU 1 vCPU 2 host
---------------------------------------------------------------
mark page dirty
write to page
reset rings
wait for mmu lock
add page to ring
release mmu lock
...do reset...
release mmu lock
page is now dirty

> Maybe we can also consider to let mark_page_dirty_in_slot() return a
> value, then the upper layer could have a chance to skip the spte
> update if mark_page_dirty_in_slot() fails to mark the dirty bit, so it
> can return directly with RET_PF_RETRY.

I don't think that's possible, most writes won't come from a page fault
path and cannot retry.

Paolo