Re: Question on dirty sync before kvm memslot removal

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

On 31/03/20 17:23, Peter Xu wrote:
>> Or KVM_MEM_READONLY.
> Yeah, I used a new flag because I thought READONLY was a bit tricky to
> be used directly here.  The thing is IIUC if guest writes to a
> READONLY slot then KVM should either ignore the write or trigger an
> error which I didn't check, however here what we want to do is to let
> the write to fallback to the userspace so it's neither dropped (we
> still want the written data to land gracefully on RAM), nor triggering
> an error (because the slot is actually writable).

No, writes fall back to userspace with KVM_MEM_READONLY.

>> The problem here is also that the GFN is not an unique identifier of the
>> QEMU ram_addr_t.  However you don't really need to kick all vCPUs out,
>> do you?  You can protect the dirty ring with its own per-vCPU mutex and
>> harvest the pages from the main thread.
> I'm not sure I get the point, but just to mention that currently the
> dirty GFNs are collected in a standalone thread (in the QEMU series
> it's called the reaper thread) rather than in the per vcpu thread
> because the KVM_RESET_DIRTY_RINGS is per-vm after all.  One major
> reason to kick the vcpus is to make sure the hardware cached dirty
> GFNs (i.e. PML) are flushed synchronously.

But you're referring to KVM kicking vCPUs not qemu_vcpu_kick.  Can you
just do an iteration of reaping after setting KVM_MEM_READONLY?

> I think the whole kick operation is indeed too heavy for this when
> with the run_on_cpu() trick, because the thing we want to know (pml
> flushing) is actually per-vcpu and no BQL interaction. Do we have/need
> a lightweight way to kick one vcpu in synchronous way?  I was
> wondering maybe something like responding a "sync kick" request in the
> vcpu thread right after KVM_RUN ends (when we don't have BQL yet).
> Would that make sense?

Not synchronously, because anything synchronous is very susceptible to
deadlocks.

Thanks,

Paolo