Re: [PATCH v7 06/12] KVM: guest_memfd: add module param for disabling TLB flushing

Patrick Roy
2025-10-11T14:32:53Z

Hey all,

sorry it took me a while to get back to this, turns out moving
internationally is move time consuming than I expected.

On Mon, 2025-09-29 at 12:20 +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 27.09.25 09:38, Patrick Roy wrote:
>> On Fri, 2025-09-26 at 21:09 +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>> On 26.09.25 12:53, Will Deacon wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Sep 26, 2025 at 10:46:15AM +0100, Patrick Roy wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, 2025-09-25 at 21:13 +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>>>>> On 25.09.25 21:59, Dave Hansen wrote:
>>>>>>> On 9/25/25 12:20, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 25.09.25 20:27, Dave Hansen wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On 9/24/25 08:22, Roy, Patrick wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> Add an option to not perform TLB flushes after direct map manipulations.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> I'd really prefer this be left out for now. It's a massive can of worms.
>>>>>>>>> Let's agree on something that works and has well-defined behavior before
>>>>>>>>> we go breaking it on purpose.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> May I ask what the big concern here is?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It's not a _big_ concern.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Oh, I read "can of worms" and thought there is something seriously problematic :)
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I just think we want to start on something
>>>>>>> like this as simple, secure, and deterministic as possible.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yes, I agree. And it should be the default. Less secure would have to be opt-in and documented thoroughly.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, I am definitely happy to have the 100% secure behavior be the
>>>>> default, and the skipping of TLB flushes be an opt-in, with thorough
>>>>> documentation!
>>>>>
>>>>> But I would like to include the "skip tlb flushes" option as part of
>>>>> this patch series straight away, because as I was alluding to in the
>>>>> commit message, with TLB flushes this is not usable for Firecracker for
>>>>> performance reasons :(
>>>>
>>>> I really don't want that option for arm64. If we're going to bother
>>>> unmapping from the linear map, we should invalidate the TLB.
>>>
>>> Reading "TLB flushes result in a up to 40x elongation of page faults in
>>> guest_memfd (scaling with the number of CPU cores), or a 5x elongation
>>> of memory population,", I can understand why one would want that optimization :)
>>>
>>> @Patrick, couldn't we use fallocate() to preallocate memory and batch the TLB flush within such an operation?
>>>
>>> That is, we wouldn't flush after each individual direct-map modification but after multiple ones part of a single operation like fallocate of a larger range.
>>>
>>> Likely wouldn't make all use cases happy.
>>>
>>
>> For Firecracker, we rely a lot on not preallocating _all_ VM memory, and
>> trying to ensure only the actual "working set" of a VM is faulted in (we
>> pack a lot more VMs onto a physical host than there is actual physical
>> memory available). For VMs that are restored from a snapshot, we know
>> pretty well what memory needs to be faulted in (that's where @Nikita's
>> write syscall comes in), so there we could try such an optimization. But
>> for everything else we very much rely on the on-demand nature of guest
>> memory allocation (and hence direct map removal). And even right now,
>> the long pole performance-wise are these on-demand faults, so really, we
>> don't want them to become even slower :(
>
> Makes sense. I guess even without support for large folios one could implement a kind of "fault" around: for example, on access to one addr, allocate+prepare all pages in the same 2 M chunk, flushing the tlb only once after adjusting all the direct map entries.
>
>>
>> Also, can we really batch multiple TLB flushes as you suggest? Even if
>> pages are at consecutive indices in guest_memfd, they're not guaranteed
>> to be continguous physically, e.g. we couldn't just coalesce multiple
>> TLB flushes into a single TLB flush of a larger range.
>
> Well, you there is the option on just flushing the complete tlb of course :) When trying to flush a range you would indeed run into the problem of flushing an ever growing range.

In the last guest_memfd upstream call (over a week ago now), we've
discussed the option of batching and deferring TLB flushes, while
providing a sort of "deadline" at which a TLB flush will
deterministically be done. E.g. guest_memfd would keep a counter of how
many pages got direct map zapped, and do a flush of a range that
contains all zapped pages every 512 allocated pages (and to ensure the
flushes even happen in a timely manner if no allocations happen for a
long time, also every, say, 5 seconds or something like that). Would
that work for everyone? I briefly tested the performance of
batch-flushes with secretmem in QEMU, and its within of 30% of the "no
TLB flushes at all" solution in a simple benchmark that just memsets
2GiB of memory.

I think something like this, together with the batch-flushing at the end
of fallocate() / write() as David suggested above should work for
Firecracker.

>> There's probably other things we can try. Backing guest_memfd with
>> hugepages would reduce the number TLB flushes by 512x (although not all
>> users of Firecracker at Amazon [can] use hugepages).
>
> Right.
>
>>
>> And I do still wonder if it's possible to have "async TLB flushes" where
>> we simply don't wait for the IPI (x86 terminology, not sure what the
>> mechanism on arm64 is). Looking at
>> smp_call_function_many_cond()/invlpgb_kernel_range_flush() on x86, it
>> seems so? Although seems like on ARM it's actually just handled by a
>> single instruction (TLBI) and not some interprocess communication
>> thingy. Maybe there's a variant that's faster / better for this usecase?
>
> Right, some architectures (and IIRC also x86 with some extension) are able to flush remote TLBs without IPIs.
>
> Doing a quick search, there seems to be some research on async TLB flushing, e.g., [1].
>
> In the context here, I wonder whether an async TLB flush would be
> significantly better than not doing an explicit TLB flush: in both
> cases, it's not really deterministic when the relevant TLB entries
> will vanish: with the async variant it might happen faster on average
> I guess.

I actually did end up playing around with this a while ago, and it made
things slightly better performance wise, but it was still too bad to be
useful :(

>
> [1] https://cs.yale.edu/homes/abhishek/kumar-taco20.pdf
>

Best,
Patrick