Re: [PATCH 5/5] vfio-pci: Best-effort huge pfnmaps with !MAP_FIXED mappings

Peter Xu
2025-06-17T23:36:14Z

On Tue, Jun 17, 2025 at 08:18:07PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2025 at 04:56:13PM -0400, Peter Xu wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 16, 2025 at 08:00:11PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jun 16, 2025 at 06:06:23PM -0400, Peter Xu wrote:
> > >
> > > > Can I understand it as a suggestion to pass in a bitmask into the core mm
> > > > API (e.g. keep the name of mm_get_unmapped_area_aligned()), instead of a
> > > > constant "align", so that core mm would try to allocate from the largest
> > > > size to smaller until it finds some working VA to use?
> > >
> > > I don't think you need a bitmask.
> > >
> > > Split the concerns, the caller knows what is inside it's FD. It only
> > > needs to provide the highest pgoff aligned folio/pfn within the FD.
> >
> > Ultimately I even dropped this hint. I found that it's not really
> > get_unmapped_area()'s job to detect over-sized pgoffs. It's mmap()'s job.
> > So I decided to avoid this parameter as of now.
>
> Well, the point of the pgoff is only what you said earlier, to adjust
> the starting alignment so the pgoff aligned high order folios/pfns
> line up properly.

I meant "highest pgoff" that I dropped.

We definitely need the pgoff to make it work. So here I dropped "highest
pgoff" passed from the caller because I decided to leave such check to the
mmap() hook later.

>
> > > The mm knows what leaf page tables options exist. It should try to
> > > align to the closest leaf page table size that is <= the FD's max
> > > aligned folio.
> >
> > So again IMHO this is also not per-FD information, but needs to be passed
> > over from the driver for each call.
>
> It is per-FD in the sense that each FD is unique and each range of
> pgoff could have a unique maximum.
>
> > Likely the "order" parameter appeared in other discussions to imply a
> > maximum supported size from the driver side (or, for a folio, but that is
> > definitely another user after this series can land).
>
> Yes, it is the only information the driver can actually provide and
> comes directly from what it will install in the VMA.
>
> > So far I didn't yet add the "order", because currently VFIO definitely
> > supports all max orders the system supports. Maybe we can add the order
> > when there's a real need, but maybe it won't happen in the near
> > future?
>
> The purpose of the order is to prevent over alignment and waste of
> VMA. Your technique to use the length to limit alignment instead is
> good enough for VFIO but not very general.

Yes that's also something I didn't like. I think I'll just go ahead and
add the order parameter, then use it in previous patch too.

I'll wait for some more time though for others' input before a respin.

Thanks,

>
> The VFIO part looks pretty good, I still don't really understand why
> you'd have CONFIG_ARCH_SUPPORTS_HUGE_PFNMAP though. The inline
> fallback you have for it seems good enough and we don't care if things
> are overaligned for ioremap.
>
> Jason
>

--
Peter Xu