Re: [PATCH v2 2/3] vfio-pci: Fault mmaps to enable vma tracking

Peter Xu
2020-05-08T02:17:04Z

On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 08:56:33PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 06:22:23PM -0400, Peter Xu wrote:
> > On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 04:03:34PM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > > On Thu, 7 May 2020 17:47:44 -0400
> > > Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi, Alex,
> > > >
> > > > On Tue, May 05, 2020 at 03:54:53PM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > > > > +/*
> > > > > + * Zap mmaps on open so that we can fault them in on access and therefore
> > > > > + * our vma_list only tracks mappings accessed since last zap.
> > > > > + */
> > > > > +static void vfio_pci_mmap_open(struct vm_area_struct *vma)
> > > > > +{
> > > > > + zap_vma_ptes(vma, vma->vm_start, vma->vm_end - vma->vm_start);
> > > >
> > > > A pure question: is this only a safety-belt or it is required in some known
> > > > scenarios?
> > >
> > > It's not required. I originally did this so that I'm not allocating a
> > > vma_list entry in a path where I can't return error, but as Jason
> > > suggested I could zap here only in the case that I do encounter that
> > > allocation fault. However I still like consolidating the vma_list
> > > handling to the vm_ops .fault and .close callbacks and potentially we
> > > reduce the zap latency by keeping the vma_list to actual users, which
> > > we'll get to eventually anyway in the VM case as memory BARs are sized
> > > and assigned addresses.
> >
> > Yes, I don't see much problem either on doing the vma_list maintainance only in
> > .fault() and .close(). My understandingg is that the worst case is the perf
> > critical applications (e.g. DPDK) could pre-fault these MMIO region easily
> > during setup if they want. My question was majorly about whether the vma
> > should be guaranteed to have no mapping at all when .open() is called. But I
> > agree with you that it's always good to have that as safety-belt anyways.
>
> If the VMA has a mapping then that specific VMA has to be in the
> linked list.
>
> So if the zap is skipped then the you have to allocate something and
> add to the linked list to track the VMA with mapping.
>
> It is not a 'safety belt'

But shouldn't open() only be called when the VMA is created for a memory range?
If so, does it also mean that the address range must have not been mapped yet?

Thanks,

--
Peter Xu