[Xen-devel] Re: mem-event interface

[Grzegorz Milos <grzegorz.milos@xxxxxxxxx>]

[From Patrick]

> Since I'm coming in the middle of this discussion, forgive me if I've
> missed something.  But is the idea here to create a more general
> interface that could support various different types of memory events
> + notification?  And the two events listed below are just a subset of
> the events that could / would be supported?

That's correct.


> In general, I like the sound of where this is going but I would like
> to see support for notification of events such as when a domU reads /
> writes / execs a pre-specified byte(s) of memory.  As such, there
> would need to be a notification path (as discussed below) and also a
> control path to setup the memory regions that the user app cares
> about.

Sub-page events is something I would like to have included as well.
Currently the control path is basically just "nominating" a page (for
either swapping or sharing). It's not entirely clear to me the best
way to go about this. With swapping and sharing we have code in Xen to
handle both cases. However, to just receive notifications (like
"read", "write", "execute") I don't think we need specialised support
(or at least just once to handle the notifications). I'm thinking it
might be good to have a daemon to handle these events in user-space
and register clients with the user-space daemon. Each client would get
a unique client ID which could be used to identify who should get the
response. This way, we could just register that somebody is interested
in that page (or byte, etc) and let the user-space tool handle most of
the complex logic (i.e. which of the clients should that particular
notification go to). This requires some notion of priority for memory
areas (e.g. if one client requests notification for access to a byte
of page foo and another requests notification for access to any of
page foo, then we only need Xen to store that it should notify for
page foo and just send along which byte(s) of the page were accessed
as well, then the user-space daemon can determine if both clients
should be notified or just the one) (e.g. if one client requests async
notification and another requests sync notification, then Xen only
needs to know to do sync notification). What's everybody thoughts on
this? Does it seem reasonable or have I gone completely mad?


Patrick

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 11:21 PM, Grzegorz Milos
<grzegorz.milos@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [From Bryan]
>
> Bryan D. Payne
>  to Patrick, me, george.dunlap, Andrew, Steven
>
> show details Jun 16 (7 days ago)
>
> Patrick, thanks for the inclusion.
>
> Since I'm coming in the middle of this discussion, forgive me if I've
> missed something.  But is the idea here to create a more general
> interface that could support various different types of memory events
> + notification?  And the two events listed below are just a subset of
> the events that could / would be supported?
>
> In general, I like the sound of where this is going but I would like
> to see support for notification of events such as when a domU reads /
> writes / execs a pre-specified byte(s) of memory.  As such, there
> would need to be a notification path (as discussed below) and also a
> control path to setup the memory regions that the user app cares
> about.
>
> -bryan
>
> On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 11:21 PM, Grzegorz Milos
> <grzegorz.milos@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> [From Patrick]
>>
>> I think the idea of multiple rings is a good one. We'll register the
>> clients in Xen and when an mem_event is reached, we can just iterate
>> through the list of listeners to see who needs a notification.
>>
>> The person working on the anti-virus stuff is Bryan Payne from Georgia
>> Tech. I've CCed him as well so we can get his input on this stuff as
>> well. It's better to hash out a proper interface now rather than
>> continually changing it around.
>>
>>
>> Patrick
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 11:19 PM, Grzegorz Milos
>> <grzegorz.milos@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> [From Gregor]
>>>
>>> There are two major events that the memory sharing code needs to
>>> communicate over the hypervisor/userspace boundary:
>>> 1. GFN unsharing failed due to lack of memory. This will be called the
>>> 'OOM event' from now on.
>>> 2. MFN is no longer sharable (actually an opaque sharing handle would
>>> be communicated instead of the MFN). 'Handle invalidate event' from
>>> now on.
>>>
>>> The requirements on the OOM event are relatively similar to the
>>> page-in event. The way this should operate is that the faulting VCPU
>>> is paused, and the pager is requested to free up some memory. When it
>>> does so, it should generate an appropriate response, and wake up the
>>> VCPU back again using a domctl. The event is going to be low volume,
>>> and since it is going to be handled synchronously, likely in tens of
>>> ms, there are no particular requirements on the efficiency.
>>>
>>> Handle invalidate event type is less important in the short term
>>> because the userspace sharing daemon is designed to be resilient to
>>> unfresh sharing state. However, if it is missing it will make the
>>> sharing progressively less effective as time goes on. The idea is that
>>> the hypervisor communicates which sharing handles are no longer valid,
>>> such that the sharing daemon only attempts to share pages in the
>>> correct state. This would be relatively high volume event, but it
>>> doesn't need to be accurate (i.e. events can be dropped if they are
>>> not consumed quickly enough). As such this event should be batch
>>> delivered, in an asynchronous fashion.
>>>
>>> The OOM event is coded up in Xen, but it will not be consumed properly
>>> in the pager. If I remember correctly, I didn't want to interfere with
>>> the page-in events because the event interface assumed that mem-event
>>> responses are inserted onto the ring in precisely the same order as
>>> the requests. This may not be the case when we start mixing different
>>> event types. WRT to the handle invalidation, the relevant hooks exist
>>> in Xen, and in the mem sharing daemon, but there is no way to
>>> communicate events to two different consumers atm.
>>>
>>> Since the requirements on the two different sharing event types are
>>> substantially different, I think it may be easier if separate channels
>>> (i.e. separate rings) were used to transfer them. This would also fix
>>> the multiple consumers issue relatively easily. Of course you may know
>>> of some other mem events that wouldn't fit in that scheme.
>>>
>>> I remember that there was someone working on an external anti-virus
>>> software, which prompted the whole mem-event work. I don't remember
>>> his/hers name or affiliation (could you remind me?), but maybe he/she
>>> would be interested in working on some of this?
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> Gregor
>>>
>>
>

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