Re: [PATCH 00/23] KVM: MMU: MMU role refactoring

Sean Christopherson
2022-02-08T01:05:08Z

On Mon, Feb 07, 2022, David Matlack wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 04, 2022 at 06:56:55AM -0500, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > The TDP MMU has a performance regression compared to the legacy
> > MMU when CR0 changes often. This was reported for the grsecurity
> > kernel, which uses CR0.WP to implement kernel W^X. In that case,
> > each change to CR0.WP unloads the MMU and causes a lot of unnecessary
> > work. When running nested, this can even cause the L1 to hardly
> > make progress, as the L0 hypervisor it is overwhelmed by the amount
> > of MMU work that is needed.
> >
> > The root cause of the issue is that the "MMU role" in KVM is a mess
> > that mixes the CPU setup (CR0/CR4/EFER, SMM, guest mode, etc.)
> > and the shadow page table format. Whenever something is different
> > between the MMU and the CPU, it is stored as an extra field in struct
> > kvm_mmu---and for extra bonus complication, sometimes the same thing
> > is stored in both the role and an extra field.
> >
> > So, this is the "no functional change intended" part of the changes
> > required to fix the performance regression. It separates neatly
> > the shadow page table format ("MMU role") from the guest page table
> > format ("CPU role"), and removes the duplicate fields.
>
> What do you think about calling this the guest_role instead of cpu_role?
> There is a bit of a precedent for using "guest" instead of "cpu" already
> for this type of concept (e.g. guest_walker), and I find it more
> intuitive.

Haven't looked at the series yet, but I'd prefer not to use guest_role, it's
too similar to is_guest_mode() and kvm_mmu_role.guest_mode. E.g. we'd end up with

static union kvm_mmu_role kvm_calc_guest_role(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu,
const struct kvm_mmu_role_regs *regs)
{
union kvm_mmu_role role = {0};

role.base.access = ACC_ALL;
role.base.smm = is_smm(vcpu);
role.base.guest_mode = is_guest_mode(vcpu);
role.base.direct = !____is_cr0_pg(regs);

...
}

and possibly

if (guest_role.guest_mode)
...

which would be quite messy. Maybe vcpu_role if cpu_role isn't intuitive?