[Xen-devel] Possible Xen grant table locking improvements

[David Vrabel <david.vrabel@xxxxxxxxxx>]

A while ago Matt Wilson posted a patch refactoring some of the grant
table locking[1].  We (XenServer) have found they significantly improve
performance.

These patches split the single grant table lock into three.

1. The grant table lock protecting grant table resizes.

2. The maptrack lock, protecting the domain's maptrack table.

3. Per-active entry locks.

But they still have some performance bottlenecks which we believe is the
maptrack lock.

### Solution

This is proposal for removing this bottleneck.  This proposal has a
number of drawbacks (see the end), which I would appreciate feedback on.

Most guests do not map a grant reference more than twice (Linux, for
example, will typically map a gref once in the kernel address space, or
twice if a userspace mapping is required).  The maptrack entries for
these two mappings can be stored in the active entry (the "fast"
entries).  If more than two mappings are required, the existing maptrack
table can be used (the "slow" entries).

A maptrack handle for a "fast" entry is encoded as:

    31 30          16  15            0
  +---+---------------+---------------+
  | F | domid         | gref          |
  +---+---------------+---------------+

F is set for a "fast" entry, and clear for a "slow" one. Grant
references above 2^16 will have to be tracked with "slow" entries.

We can omit taking the grant table lock to check the validity of a grant
ref or maptrack handle since these tables only grow and do not shrink.

If strict IOMMU mode is used, IOMMU mappings are updated on every grant
map/unmap.  These are currently setup such that BFN == MFN which
requires reference counting the IOMMU mappings so they are only torn
down when all grefs for that MFN are unmapped.  This requires an
expensive mapcount() operation that iterates over the whole maptrack table.

There is no requirement for BFN == MFN so each grant map can create its
own IOMMU mapping.  This will require a region of bus address space that
does not overlap with RAM.

### Possible Problems

1. The "fast" maptrack entries cause a problem when destroying domains.

A domain being destroyed need tear down all active grant maps it has.
It currently does this with a O(M) operation -- iterating over all the
maptrack entries.

With the "fast" maptrack entries being stored in the remote domain's
active grant entry tables, a walk of all map track entries must iterate
over /every/ domains' active grant entry tables /and/ the local maptrack
table).  This is O(D * G + M), which is maybe too expensive?

(D = number of domains, G = mean grant table size, M = number of local
maptrack entries).

2. The "fast" maptrack entries means we cannot[2] limit the total number
of grant maps a domain can make.

However, I view this as a positive since it removes a hard scalability
limit (the maptrack table limit).

David

[1] http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2013-11/msg01517.html

[2] We could be that would require synchronizing access to a per-domain
map count which I'm trying to avoid.

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