Re: [PATCH for-4.5 v6 10/17] xen/arm: p2m type definitions and changes

[Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>]

On Tue, 2014-09-16 at 10:49 +0200, Tamas K Lengyel wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 12:35 AM, Ian Campbell
> <ian.campbell@citrix.com> wrote:
>         On Mon, 2014-09-15 at 16:02 +0200, Tamas K Lengyel wrote:
>         > Define p2m_access_t in ARM and add necessary changes for
>         page table
>         > construction routines to pass the default access
>         information. Also,
>         > define the Radix tree that will hold access permission
>         settings as
>         > the PTE's don't have enough software programmable bits
>         available.
>         
>         So my main concern here is the overhead for non-xenaccess
>         users. I think
>         it amounts to a few extra fields in the p2m_domain struct
>         which I can
>         see here and presumably some NULL vs. non-NULL type checks
>         which I guess
>         we will get to later. The important thing is that the fast
>         paths for the
>         common case don't get a lot of extra overhead.
>         
>         WRT the xenaccess performance did you consider any options
>         other than a
>         radix tree (which seems quite expensive to me)? e.g. perhaps
>         allocating
>         (only when needed) as second page for each real T page as a
>         shadow/extended region? Perhaps pointed to by a filed in the
>         real PT
>         struct page_info. I'm sure there are other possible ideas too.
>         
>         Ian,
> 
> 
> Those would all be possible solutions. I used the Radix tree
> implementation already in Xen as a matter of convenience and because
> it has an acceptable overhead. I certainly don't oppose further
> optimizing this code, I'm just not sure if it needs to happen now,
> provided feature freeze is rapidly approaching. The main concern
> should be impact on non-xenaccess code-paths, which I agree are a
> showstopper of any feature like this. If you say it can't be merged
> unless the xenaccess code-path is also optimized I'm afraid this
> series will be postponed till 4.6 as I won't have the time to test out
> which approach puts the least overhead on the system under what
> usage-scenarios etc in this timeframe.

WRT merging I'm only concerned about the impact on non-xenaccess uses,
the stuff about the xenaccess-on case was just idle wondering, sorry for
not making that clear.

Ian.