Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 30 Jul 2013 21:11:46 +0800 | From | Xiao Guangrong <> | Subject | Re: [RFC PATCH 00/12] KVM: MMU: locklessly wirte-protect |
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On 07/30/2013 09:01 PM, Xiao Guangrong wrote: > Background > ========== > Currently, when mark memslot dirty logged or get dirty page, we need to > write-protect large guest memory, it is the heavy work, especially, we need to > hold mmu-lock which is also required by vcpu to fix its page table fault and > mmu-notifier when host page is being changed. In the extreme cpu / memory used > guest, it becomes a scalability issue. > > This patchset introduces a way to locklessly write-protect guest memory. > > Idea > ========== > There are the challenges we meet and the ideas to resolve them. > > 1) How to locklessly walk rmap? > The first idea we got to prevent "desc" being freed when we are walking the > rmap is using RCU. But when vcpu runs on shadow page mode or nested mmu mode, > it updates the rmap really frequently. > > So we uses SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU to manage "desc" instead, it allows the object > to be reused more quickly. We also store a "nulls" in the last "desc" > (desc->more) which can help us to detect whether the "desc" is moved to anther > rmap then we can re-walk the rmap if that happened. I learned this idea from > nulls-list. > > Another issue is, when a spte is deleted from the "desc", another spte in the > last "desc" will be moved to this position to replace the deleted one. If the > deleted one has been accessed and we do not access the replaced one, the > replaced one is missed when we do lockless walk. > To fix this case, we do not backward move the spte, instead, we forward move > the entry: when a spte is deleted, we move the entry in the first desc to that > position. > > 2) How to locklessly access shadow page table? > It is easy if the handler is in the vcpu context, in that case we can use > walk_shadow_page_lockless_begin() and walk_shadow_page_lockless_end() that > disable interrupt to stop shadow page be freed. But we are on the ioctl context > and the paths we are optimizing for have heavy workload, disabling interrupt is > not good for the system performance. > > We add a indicator into kvm struct (kvm->arch.rcu_free_shadow_page), then use > call_rcu() to free the shadow page if that indicator is set. Set/Clear the > indicator are protected by slot-lock, so it need not be atomic and does not > hurt the performance and the scalability. > > 3) How to locklessly write-protect guest memory? > Currently, there are two behaviors when we write-protect guest memory, one is > clearing the Writable bit on spte and the another one is dropping spte when it > points to large page. The former is easy we only need to atomicly clear a bit > but the latter is hard since we need to remove the spte from rmap. so we unify > these two behaviors that only make the spte readonly. Making large spte > readonly instead of nonpresent is also good for reducing jitter. > > And we need to pay more attention on the order of making spte writable, adding > spte into rmap and setting the corresponding bit on dirty bitmap since > kvm_vm_ioctl_get_dirty_log() write-protects the spte based on the dirty bitmap, > we should ensure the writable spte can be found in rmap before the dirty bitmap > is visible. Otherwise, we cleared the dirty bitmap and failed to write-protect > the page. > > Performance result > ==================== > Host: CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5690 @ 3.47GHz x 12 > Mem: 36G > > The benchmark i used and will be attached:
The benchmarks have been attached in this mail.
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