Re: [PATCH v6 0/5] Add NUMA mempolicy support for KVM guest-memfd

Vishal Annapurve
2025-03-09T01:10:03Z

On Wed, Feb 26, 2025 at 12:28 AM Shivank Garg <shivankg@amd.com> wrote:
>
> In this patch-series:
> Based on the discussion in the bi-weekly guest_memfd upstream call on
> 2025-02-20[4], I have dropped the RFC tag, documented the memory allocation
> behavior after policy changes and added selftests.
>
>
> KVM's guest-memfd memory backend currently lacks support for NUMA policy
> enforcement, causing guest memory allocations to be distributed arbitrarily
> across host NUMA nodes regardless of the policy specified by the VMM. This
> occurs because conventional userspace NUMA control mechanisms like mbind()
> are ineffective with guest-memfd, as the memory isn't directly mapped to
> userspace when allocations occur.
>
> This patch-series adds NUMA binding capabilities to guest_memfd backend
> KVM guests. It has evolved through several approaches based on community
> feedback:
>
> - v1,v2: Extended the KVM_CREATE_GUEST_MEMFD IOCTL to pass mempolicy.
> - v3: Introduced fbind() syscall for VMM memory-placement configuration.
> - v4-v6: Current approach using shared_policy support and vm_ops (based on
> suggestions from David[1] and guest_memfd biweekly upstream call[2]).
>
> For SEV-SNP guests, which use the guest-memfd memory backend, NUMA-aware
> memory placement is essential for optimal performance, particularly for
> memory-intensive workloads.
>
> This series implements proper NUMA policy support for guest-memfd by:
>
> 1. Adding mempolicy-aware allocation APIs to the filemap layer.

I have been thinking more about this after the last guest_memfd
upstream call on March 6th.

To allow 1G page support with guest_memfd [1] without encountering
significant memory overheads, its important to support in-place memory
conversion with private hugepages getting split/merged upon
conversion. Private pages can be seamlessly split/merged only if the
refcounts of complete subpages are frozen, most effective way to
achieve and enforce this is to just not have struct pages for private
memory. All the guest_memfd private range users (including IOMMU [2]
in future) can request pfns for offsets and get notified about
invalidation when pfns go away.

Not having struct pages for private memory also provide additional benefits:
* Significantly lesser memory overhead for handling splitting/merge operations
- With struct pages around, every split of 1G page needs struct
page allocation for 512 * 512 4K pages in worst case.
* Enable roadmap for PFN range allocators in the backend and usecases
like KHO [3] that target use of memory without struct page.

IIRC, filemap was initially used as a matter of convenience for
initial guest memfd implementation.

As pointed by David in the call, to get rid of struct page for private
memory ranges, filemap/pagecache needs to be replaced by a lightweight
mechanism that tracks offsets -> pfns mapping for private memory
ranges while still keeping filemap/pagecache for shared memory ranges
(it's still needed to allow GUP usecases). I am starting to think that
the filemap replacement for private memory ranges should be done
sooner rather than later, otherwise it will become more and more
difficult with features landing in guest_memfd relying on presence of
filemap.

This discussion matters more for hugepages and PFN range allocations.
I would like to ensure that we have consensus on this direction.

[1] https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1764/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/CAGtprH8C4MQwVTFPBMbFWyW4BrK8-mDqjJn-UUFbFhw4w23f3A@mail.gmail.com/
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20240805093245.889357-1-jgowans@amazon.com/