Re: [PATCH v6 0/8] KVM: mm: fd-based approach for supporting KVM guest private memory

Andy Lutomirski
2022-06-14T17:38:02Z

On Tue, Jun 14, 2022 at 12:32 AM Chao Peng <chao.p.peng@linux.intel.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2022 at 08:29:06PM +0000, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 08, 2022, Vishal Annapurve wrote:
> >
> > One argument is that userspace can simply rely on cgroups to detect misbehaving
> > guests, but (a) those types of OOMs will be a nightmare to debug and (b) an OOM
> > kill from the host is typically considered a _host_ issue and will be treated as
> > a missed SLO.
> >
> > An idea for handling this in the kernel without too much complexity would be to
> > add F_SEAL_FAULT_ALLOCATIONS (terrible name) that would prevent page faults from
> > allocating pages, i.e. holes can only be filled by an explicit fallocate(). Minor
> > faults, e.g. due to NUMA balancing stupidity, and major faults due to swap would
> > still work, but writes to previously unreserved/unallocated memory would get a
> > SIGSEGV on something it has mapped. That would allow the userspace VMM to prevent
> > unintentional allocations without having to coordinate unmapping/remapping across
> > multiple processes.
>
> Since this is mainly for shared memory and the motivation is catching
> misbehaved access, can we use mprotect(PROT_NONE) for this? We can mark
> those range backed by private fd as PROT_NONE during the conversion so
> subsequence misbehaved accesses will be blocked instead of causing double
> allocation silently.

This patch series is fairly close to implementing a rather more
efficient solution. I'm not familiar enough with hypervisor userspace
to really know if this would work, but:

What if shared guest memory could also be file-backed, either in the
same fd or with a second fd covering the shared portion of a memslot?
This would allow changes to the backing store (punching holes, etc) to
be some without mmap_lock or host-userspace TLB flushes? Depending on
what the guest is doing with its shared memory, userspace might need
the memory mapped or it might not.

--Andy