Re: Re: [PATCH] Add hypercall to mark superpages to improve performance

[Keir Fraser <keir.fraser@eu.citrix.com>]

On 03/05/2010 02:55, "Dave McCracken" <dcm@mccr.org> wrote:

> On Sunday 02 May 2010, Keir Fraser wrote:
>> Oh, now I think about it, although your suggestion deals with type
>> conflicts, it doesn't handle page lifetimes. What if a page is only mapped
>> as a superpage? The page->count_info would not be incremented by the
>> superpage mappings, and the page would be erroneously freed to the Xen free
>> pools? So I'm not so sure we can so easily avoid the
>> mess-with-every-page's-refcount on first mapping of a superpage... :-(
> 
> It should be simple enough to also check superpage->count_info in those
> places.  So the total mappings of a page would be page->count_info +
> superpage->count_info.  Good thing you suggested we also have a count in the
> superpage_info struct :)

I think you're going to have trouble handling two separate reference counts,
for superpages and single pages, in a race-free manner that is any better
than checking/updating reference counts across all pages in a superpage on
first superpage mapping.

 -- Keir