[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Xen-devel] [RFC 16/16] xen/arm: Track page accessed between batch of Set/Way operations





On 06/11/2018 17:43, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
On Mon, 5 Nov 2018, Julien Grall wrote:
Hi Stefano,

On 11/5/18 9:35 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
On Mon, 8 Oct 2018, Julien Grall wrote:
At the moment, the implementation of Set/Way operations will go through
all the entries of the guest P2M and flush them. However, this is very
expensive and may render unusable a guest OS using them.

For instance, Linux 32-bit will use Set/Way operations during secondary
CPU bring-up. As the implementation is really expensive, it may be
possible
to hit the CPU bring-up timeout.

To limit the Set/Way impact, we track what pages has been of the guest
has been accessed between batch of Set/Way operations. This is done
using bit[0] (aka valid bit) of the P2M entry.

This is going to improve performance of ill-mannered guests at the cost
of hurting performance of well-mannered guests. Is it really a good
trade-off? Should this behavior at least be configurable with a Xen
command line?

Well, we have the choice between not been able to boot Linux 32-bit anymore or
have a slight impact at the boot time for all guests.

Wait -- I thought that with the set/way emulation introduced by patch
#15 we would be able to boot Linux 32-bit already. This patch is a
performance improvement. Or is it actually needed to boot Linux 32-bit?

The problem is Linux 32-bit calls a few time set/way during secondary CPU bring up. It also has a timeout of 1s to fully boot that CPU. In my testing, I can easily hit the timeout even with a small amount of memory.

If we don't start tracking the page from the beginning, then you would need to clean the full RAM the first time. If you start to track from the beginning, you may just have to clean a couple of MB.



As you may have noticed the command line is been suggested below. I didn't yet
implemented as we agreed at Connect it would be good to start getting feedback
on it.

Sure. I was thinking about this -- does it make sense to have different
defaults for 32bit and 64bit guests?

32bit -> default p2m_invalidate_root
64bit -> default not

The decision is not that easy. While Linux arm64 does not contain set/way anymore, UEFI still use them (I checked it a couple of months ago).

I haven't done any benchmark yet. That's my next step.

I am not entirely to understand your last sentence, this feature is turned off
when an IOMMU is present. So what is your use case here?
My sentence was badly written, sorry. I meant to say that even when an
IOMMU is NOT present, there are cases where we might not want to call
p2m_invalidate_root.

Before implementing a command line option (or even plumbing that to the guest configuration), I want to understand what is the real impact on the boot time for "normal" guest.

Cheers,

--
Julien Grall

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.xenproject.org/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel

 


Rackspace

Lists.xenproject.org is hosted with RackSpace, monitoring our
servers 24x7x365 and backed by RackSpace's Fanatical Support®.