[Xen-devel] [RFC PATCH v2 0/14] Live update: boot memory management, data stream handling

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Expanding on the previous WIP patch set.

As before, reserve a contiguous region of memory which can be safely
used by the boot allocator in the new Xen, before the live update data
stream has been processed and thus before the locations of all the
other pages which contain live domain data are known.

As the last gasp of kexec_reloc(), leave a 'breadcrumb' in the first
words of the reserved bootmem region, for Xen to find the live update
data. Which is mostly a guest-transparent live migration data stream,
except the guest memory is left in-place.

The breadcrumb has a magic value, the physical address of an MFN array
referencing the pages with actual data, and the number of such pages.
All of these are allocated in arbitrary heap pages (and not in the
reserved bootmem region) by the original Xen.

Provide functions on the "save" side for appending to the LU data
stream (designed to cope with the way that hvm_save_size() and
hvm_save() work), and on the "receive" side for detecting and mapping it.

On the way to excluding "already in use" pages from being added to the
heap at start up, also fix the long-standing bug that pages marked bad
with 'badpage=' on the command line weren't being eschewed if they were
above HYPERVISOR_VIRT_END and added directly to the heap; only
init_boot_pages() was doing that filtering.

This is now handled by setting either PGC_broken (for bad pages) or
PGC_allocated (for those containing live update data) in the
corresponding page_info, at a time when the frametable is expected to
be initialised to zero. When init_heap_pages() sees such a page it
knows not to use it. Bad pages thus get completely ignored as they
should be (and put on the pointless page_broken_list that nobody ever
uses AFAICT).

The "in use" pages will need some rehabilitation (of refcount,
ownership etc.) before the system is in a correct state. That will come
shortly, as we start passing real domain data across this mechanism and
processing it.

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