Re: [PATCH v5] KVM: x86/mmu: Retry fault before acquiring mmu_lock if mapping is changing

["Huang, Kai" <kai.huang@intel.com>]

On Wed, 2024-02-21 at 17:26 -0800, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> Retry page faults without acquiring mmu_lock, and without even faulting
> the page into the primary MMU, if the resolved gfn is covered by an active
> invalidation.  Contending for mmu_lock is especially problematic on
> preemptible kernels as the mmu_notifier invalidation task will yield
> mmu_lock (see rwlock_needbreak()), delay the in-progress invalidation, and
> ultimately increase the latency of resolving the page fault.  And in the
> worst case scenario, yielding will be accompanied by a remote TLB flush,
> e.g. if the invalidation covers a large range of memory and vCPUs are
> accessing addresses that were already zapped.
> 
> Faulting the page into the primary MMU is similarly problematic, as doing
> so may acquire locks that need to be taken for the invalidation to
> complete (the primary MMU has finer grained locks than KVM's MMU), and/or
> may cause unnecessary churn (getting/putting pages, marking them accessed,
> etc).
> 
> Alternatively, the yielding issue could be mitigated by teaching KVM's MMU
> iterators to perform more work before yielding, but that wouldn't solve
> the lock contention and would negatively affect scenarios where a vCPU is
> trying to fault in an address that is NOT covered by the in-progress
> invalidation.
> 
> Add a dedicated lockess version of the range-based retry check to avoid
> false positives on the sanity check on start+end WARN, and so that it's
> super obvious that checking for a racing invalidation without holding
> mmu_lock is unsafe (though obviously useful).
> 
> Wrap mmu_invalidate_in_progress in READ_ONCE() to ensure that pre-checking
> invalidation in a loop won't put KVM into an infinite loop, e.g. due to
> caching the in-progress flag and never seeing it go to '0'.
> 
> Force a load of mmu_invalidate_seq as well, even though it isn't strictly
> necessary to avoid an infinite loop, as doing so improves the probability
> that KVM will detect an invalidation that already completed before
> acquiring mmu_lock and bailing anyways.
> 
> Do the pre-check even for non-preemptible kernels, as waiting to detect
> the invalidation until mmu_lock is held guarantees the vCPU will observe
> the worst case latency in terms of handling the fault, and can generate
> even more mmu_lock contention.  E.g. the vCPU will acquire mmu_lock,
> detect retry, drop mmu_lock, re-enter the guest, retake the fault, and
> eventually re-acquire mmu_lock.  This behavior is also why there are no
> new starvation issues due to losing the fairness guarantees provided by
> rwlocks: if the vCPU needs to retry, it _must_ drop mmu_lock, i.e. waiting
> on mmu_lock doesn't guarantee forward progress in the face of _another_
> mmu_notifier invalidation event.
> 
> Note, adding READ_ONCE() isn't entirely free, e.g. on x86, the READ_ONCE()
> may generate a load into a register instead of doing a direct comparison
> (MOV+TEST+Jcc instead of CMP+Jcc), but practically speaking the added cost
> is a few bytes of code and maaaaybe a cycle or three.
> 
> Reported-by: Yan Zhao <yan.y.zhao@intel.com>
> Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/all/ZNnPF4W26ZbAyGto@yzhao56-desk.sh.intel.com
> Reported-by: Friedrich Weber <f.weber@proxmox.com>
> Cc: Kai Huang <kai.huang@intel.com>
> Cc: Yan Zhao <yan.y.zhao@intel.com>
> Cc: Yuan Yao <yuan.yao@linux.intel.com>
> Cc: Xu Yilun <yilun.xu@linux.intel.com>
> Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
> ---
> 

Acked-by: Kai Huang <kai.huang@intel.com>