Re: [PATCHv7 00/14] mm, x86/cc: Implement support for unaccepted memory

Kirill A. Shutemov
2022-06-27T11:30:28Z

On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 10:37:10AM -0600, Peter Gonda wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 14, 2022 at 6:03 AM Kirill A. Shutemov
> <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > UEFI Specification version 2.9 introduces the concept of memory
> > acceptance: some Virtual Machine platforms, such as Intel TDX or AMD
> > SEV-SNP, requiring memory to be accepted before it can be used by the
> > guest. Accepting happens via a protocol specific for the Virtual
> > Machine platform.
> >
> > Accepting memory is costly and it makes VMM allocate memory for the
> > accepted guest physical address range. It's better to postpone memory
> > acceptance until memory is needed. It lowers boot time and reduces
> > memory overhead.
> >
> > The kernel needs to know what memory has been accepted. Firmware
> > communicates this information via memory map: a new memory type --
> > EFI_UNACCEPTED_MEMORY -- indicates such memory.
> >
> > Range-based tracking works fine for firmware, but it gets bulky for
> > the kernel: e820 has to be modified on every page acceptance. It leads
> > to table fragmentation, but there's a limited number of entries in the
> > e820 table
> >
> > Another option is to mark such memory as usable in e820 and track if the
> > range has been accepted in a bitmap. One bit in the bitmap represents
> > 2MiB in the address space: one 4k page is enough to track 64GiB or
> > physical address space.
> >
> > In the worst-case scenario -- a huge hole in the middle of the
> > address space -- It needs 256MiB to handle 4PiB of the address
> > space.
> >
> > Any unaccepted memory that is not aligned to 2M gets accepted upfront.
> >
> > The approach lowers boot time substantially. Boot to shell is ~2.5x
> > faster for 4G TDX VM and ~4x faster for 64G.
> >
> > TDX-specific code isolated from the core of unaccepted memory support. It
> > supposed to help to plug-in different implementation of unaccepted memory
> > such as SEV-SNP.
> >
> > The tree can be found here:
> >
> > https://github.com/intel/tdx.git guest-unaccepted-memory
>
> Hi Kirill,
>
> I have a couple questions about this feature mainly about how cloud
> customers can use this, I assume since this is a confidential compute
> feature a large number of the users of these patches will be cloud
> customers using TDX and SNP. One issue I see with these patches is how
> do we as a cloud provider know whether a customer's linux image
> supports this feature, if the image doesn't have these patches UEFI
> needs to fully validate the memory, if the image does we can use this
> new protocol. In GCE we supply our VMs with a version of the EDK2 FW
> and the customer doesn't input into which UEFI we run, as far as I can
> tell from the Azure SNP VM documentation it seems very similar. We
> need to somehow tell our UEFI in the VM what to do based on the image.
> The current way I can see to solve this issue would be to have our
> customers give us metadata about their VM's image but this seems kinda
> burdensome on our customers (I assume we'll have more features which
> both UEFI and kernel need to both support inorder to be turned on like
> this one) and error-prone, if a customer incorrectly labels their
> image it may fail to boot.. Has there been any discussion about how to
> solve this? My naive thoughts were what if UEFI and Kernel had some
> sort of feature negotiation. Maybe that could happen via an extension
> to exit boot services or a UEFI runtime driver, I'm not sure what's
> best here just some ideas.

Just as an idea, we can put info into UTS_VERSION which can be read from
the built bzImage. We have info on SMP and preeption there already.

Patch below does this:

$ file arch/x86/boot/bzImage
arch/x86/boot/bzImage: Linux kernel x86 boot executable bzImage, version 5.19.0-rc3-00016-g2f6aa48e28d9-dirty (kas@box) #2300 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC UNACCEPTED_MEMORY Mon Jun 27 14:23:04 , RO-rootFS, swap_dev 0XC, Normal VGA

Note UNACCEPTED_MEMORY in the output.

Probably we want to have there info on which flavour of unaccepted memory
is supported (TDX/SNP/whatever). It is a bit more tricky.

Any opinion?

diff --git a/init/Makefile b/init/Makefile
index d82623d7fc8e..6688ea43e6bf 100644
--- a/init/Makefile
+++ b/init/Makefile
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ quiet_cmd_compile.h = CHK $@
$(CONFIG_SHELL) $(srctree)/scripts/mkcompile_h $@ \
"$(UTS_MACHINE)" "$(CONFIG_SMP)" "$(CONFIG_PREEMPT_BUILD)" \
"$(CONFIG_PREEMPT_DYNAMIC)" "$(CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT)" \
- "$(CONFIG_CC_VERSION_TEXT)" "$(LD)"
+ "$(CONFIG_UNACCEPTED_MEMORY)" "$(CONFIG_CC_VERSION_TEXT)" "$(LD)"

include/generated/compile.h: FORCE
$(call cmd,compile.h)
diff --git a/scripts/mkcompile_h b/scripts/mkcompile_h
index ca40a5258c87..efacfecad699 100755
--- a/scripts/mkcompile_h
+++ b/scripts/mkcompile_h
@@ -7,8 +7,9 @@ SMP=$3
PREEMPT=$4
PREEMPT_DYNAMIC=$5
PREEMPT_RT=$6
-CC_VERSION="$7"
-LD=$8
+UNACCEPTED_MEMORY=$7
+CC_VERSION="$8"
+LD=$9

# Do not expand names
set -f
@@ -51,6 +52,10 @@ elif [ -n "$PREEMPT" ] ; then
CONFIG_FLAGS="$CONFIG_FLAGS PREEMPT"
fi

+if [ -n "$UNACCEPTED_MEMORY" ] ; then
+ CONFIG_FLAGS="$CONFIG_FLAGS UNACCEPTED_MEMORY"
+fi
+
# Truncate to maximum length
UTS_LEN=64
UTS_VERSION="$(echo $UTS_VERSION $CONFIG_FLAGS $TIMESTAMP | cut -b -$UTS_LEN)"
--
Kirill A. Shutemov