Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] KVM: x86/mmu: Don't allow TDP MMU to yield when recovering NX pages

Paolo Bonzini
2021-03-30T17:19:42Z

On 25/03/21 23:25, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2021, Ben Gardon wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 1:01 PM Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com> wrote:
>>> +static inline bool kvm_tdp_mmu_zap_gfn_range(struct kvm *kvm, gfn_t start,
>>> + gfn_t end)
>>> +{
>>> + return __kvm_tdp_mmu_zap_gfn_range(kvm, start, end, true);
>>> +}
>>> +static inline bool kvm_tdp_mmu_zap_sp(struct kvm *kvm, struct kvm_mmu_page *sp)
>>
>> I'm a little leary of adding an interface which takes a non-root
>> struct kvm_mmu_page as an argument to the TDP MMU.
>> In the TDP MMU, the struct kvm_mmu_pages are protected rather subtly.
>> I agree this is safe because we hold the MMU lock in write mode here,
>> but if we ever wanted to convert to holding it in read mode things
>> could get complicated fast.
>> Maybe this is more of a concern if the function started to be used
>> elsewhere since NX recovery is already so dependent on the write lock.
>
> Agreed. Even writing the comment below felt a bit awkward when thinking about
> additional users holding mmu_lock for read. Actually, I should remove that
> specific blurb since zapping currently requires holding mmu_lock for write.
>
>> Ideally though, NX reclaim could use MMU read lock +
>> tdp_mmu_pages_lock to protect the list and do reclaim in parallel with
>> everything else.
>
> Yar, processing all legacy MMU pages, and then all TDP MMU pages to avoid some
> of these dependencies crossed my mind. But, it's hard to justify effectively
> walking the list twice. And maintaining two lists might lead to balancing
> issues, e.g. the legacy MMU and thus nested VMs get zapped more often than the
> TDP MMU, or vice versa.
>
>> The nice thing about drawing the TDP MMU interface in terms of GFNs
>> and address space IDs instead of SPs is that it doesn't put
>> constraints on the implementation of the TDP MMU because those GFNs
>> are always going to be valid / don't require any shared memory.
>> This is kind of innocuous because it's immediately converted into that
>> gfn interface, so I don't know how much it really matters.
>>
>> In any case this change looks correct and I don't want to hold up
>> progress with bikeshedding.
>> WDYT?
>
> I think we're kind of hosed either way. Either we add a helper in the TDP MMU
> that takes a SP, or we bleed a lot of information about the details of TDP MMU
> into the common MMU. E.g. the function could be open-coded verbatim, but the
> whole comment below, and the motivation for not feeding in flush is very
> dependent on the internal details of TDP MMU.
>
> I don't have a super strong preference. One thought would be to assert that
> mmu_lock is held for write, and then it largely come future person's problem :-)

Queued all three, with lockdep_assert_held_write here.

Paolo