Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] SKSM: Synchronous Kernel Samepage Merging

[Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2025, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 28.02.25 06:17, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 at 19:03, Mathieu Desnoyers
> > <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > I'd be fine with SKSM replacing KSM entirely. However, I don't
> > > think we should try to re-implement the existing KSM userspace ABIs
> > > over SKSM.
> > 
> > No, absolutely. The only point (for me) for your new synchronous one
> > would be if it replaced the kernel thread async scanning, which would
> > make the old user space interface basically pointless.
> > 
> > But I don't actually know who uses KSM right now. My reaction really
> > comes from a "it's not nice code in the kernel", not from any actual
> > knowledge of the users.
> > 
> > Maybe it works really well in some cloud VM environment, and we're
> > stuck with it forever.
> 
> Exactly that; and besides the VM use-case, lately people stated using it in
> the context of interpreters (IIRC inside Meta) quite successfully as well.

Does Red Hat (or any other KVM supporters) actually recommend using KSM for VMs
in cloud environments?

The security implications of scanning guest memory and having co-tenant VMs share
mappings (should) make it a complete non-starter for any scenario where VMs and/or
their workloads are owned by third parties.

I can imagine there might be first-party use cases, but I would expect many/most
of those to be able to explicitly share mappings, which would provide far, far
better power and performance characteristics.