Re: [Xen-devel] RE: Memory sharing, is it possible a page is freed in DomU on its way to be shared?

[Jui-Hao Chiang <juihaochiang@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I remember Tim said there already exist potential problem in p2m type,
and could be taken care of after 4.1 is released.
Forget about mem_sharing first, say if I want to grab a page that no
other Xen code can touch and use, how do I do it in the current Xen?
I guess this should not be a problem only for mem_sharing.

The other solution I am thinking is to use the RCU write lock in
mem_sharing can solve the race condition on p2m type.
But it seems the RCU mechanism favors the reader but not the writer,
in our case, the mem_sharing code.
If that's the case, then the mem_sharing operation will block for a
long period, e.g. the guest page fault triggers unshare(), and degrade
the response time of guest domain.

Bests,
Jui-Hao

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 10:46 PM, pengfei zhang <zpfalpc23@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> After thinking of this problem for some time, I think this situation can not 
> happen for my point of view.
> After the block disk driver has get the request from I/O dispatcher, if the 
> buffer memory is freed for other use,
> no one will notify the driver about this, and this will cause data 
> reading conflict. So the kernel must do something(protect the buffer until 
> response from driver?) to avoid this.
> ________________________________
> Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:27:46 -0700
> From: [hidden email]
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Memory sharing, is it possible a page is freed in DomU on its way to 
> be shared?
>
> Hi:
>
>       Just come up this question.
>
>       Say a process in domU read IO, then blkfront driver will have a new 
> page prepared to
> fill the IO data. The blkfront pass the gref to blkback in dom0, later 
> passed  to blktap, then
> forward to  tapdisk for physical IO read, in memory sharing, the gref may be 
> nominate to
> Xen for page sharing again( say this is sharing step).
>
>       My question is, it is possible during the IO data comes back from 
> tapdisk, the page
> referred by gerf in domU could be freed? (maybe by process termination, or 
> blkfront free this page)
>
>      And if it is possible, then the page is free in domU, it is also 
> possible that the page be given
> back to Xen through ballloon driver, and the P2M will be invaild.  This may 
> make *sharing step*
> gfn points to a invalid mfn possible.
>
>      So is this possible happen?
>
>      thanks.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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