Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:28:08 +0300 | | From | Avi Kivity <> | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] mmu_notifier, kvm: Introduce dirty bit tracking in spte and mmu notifier to help KSM dirty bit tracking |
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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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