Re: [PATCH 10/19] KVM: Use follow_pfnmap API

[Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 04:44:40PM -0700, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> 
> > > > > I don't think it has to be done in this series, but a future
> > > > > optimization to consider is having follow_pfnmap just tell the caller
> > > > > about the mapping level directly. It already found this information as
> > > > > part of its walk. I think there's a possibility to simplify KVM /
> > > > > avoid it having to do its own walk again later.
> > > >
> > > > AFAIU pfnmap isn't special in this case, as we do the "walk pgtable twice"
> > > > idea also to a generic page here, so probably not directly relevant to this
> > > > patch alone.
> > 
> > Ya.  My original hope was that KVM could simply walk the host page tables and get
> > whatever PFN+size it found, i.e. that KVM wouldn't care about pfn-mapped versus
> > regular pages.  That might be feasible after dropping all of KVM's refcounting
> > shenanigans[*]?  Not sure, haven't thought too much about it, precisely because
> > I too think it won't provide any meaningful performance boost.
> 
> The main thing, from my perspective, is that KVM reliably creates 1G
> mappings in its table if the VMA has 1G mappings, across all arches
> and scenarios. For normal memory and PFNMAP equally.

Yes, KVM walks the host page tables for the user virtual address and uses whatever
page size it finds, regardless of what the mapping type.

> Not returning the size here makes me wonder if that actually happens?

It does happen, the idea here was purely to avoid the second page table walk.

> Does KVM have another way to know what size entry to create?
> 
> Jason