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SubjectRe: [PATCH] mmu_notifier, kvm: Introduce dirty bit tracking in spte and mmu notifier to help KSM dirty bit tracking
On 06/22/2011 02:24 PM, Avi Kivity wrote:
> On 06/22/2011 02:19 PM, Izik Eidus wrote:
>> On 6/22/2011 2:10 PM, Avi Kivity wrote:
>>> On 06/22/2011 02:05 PM, Izik Eidus wrote:
>>>>>> + spte = rmap_next(kvm, rmapp, NULL);
>>>>>> + while (spte) {
>>>>>> + int _dirty;
>>>>>> + u64 _spte = *spte;
>>>>>> + BUG_ON(!(_spte& PT_PRESENT_MASK));
>>>>>> + _dirty = _spte& PT_DIRTY_MASK;
>>>>>> + if (_dirty) {
>>>>>> + dirty = 1;
>>>>>> + clear_bit(PT_DIRTY_SHIFT, (unsigned long *)spte);
>>>>>> + }
>>>>>
>>>>> Racy. Also, needs a tlb flush eventually.
>>>> +
>>>>
>>>> Hi, one of the issues is that the whole point of this patch is not
>>>> do tlb flush eventually,
>>>> But I see your point, because other users will not expect such
>>>> behavior, so maybe there is need into a parameter
>>>> flush_tlb=?, or add another mmu notifier call?
>>>>
>>>
>>> If you don't flush the tlb, a subsequent write will not see that
>>> spte.d is clear and the write will happen. So you'll see the page
>>> as clean even though it's dirty. That's not acceptable.
>>>
>>
>> Yes, but this is exactly what we want from this use case:
>> Right now ksm calculate the page hash to see if it was changed, the
>> idea behind this patch is to use the dirty bit instead,
>> however the guest might not really like the fact that we will flush
>> its tlb over and over again, specially in periodically scan like ksm
>> does.
>
> I see.

Actually, this is dangerous. If we use the dirty bit for other things,
we will get data corruption.

For example we might want to map clean host pages as writeable-clean in
the spte on a read fault so that we don't get a page fault when they get
eventually written.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function



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