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Re: [RFC PATCH] xen/memory: Introduce a hypercall to provide unallocated space



Hi Jan,

On 03/08/2021 13:49, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 28.07.2021 21:53, Julien Grall wrote:
On 28/07/2021 20:00, Andrew Cooper wrote:
On 28/07/2021 18:27, Julien Grall wrote:
On 28/07/2021 18:19, Andrew Cooper wrote:
On 28/07/2021 17:18, Oleksandr Tyshchenko wrote:
From: Oleksandr Tyshchenko <oleksandr_tyshchenko@xxxxxxxx>

Add XENMEM_get_unallocated_space hypercall which purpose is to
query hypervisor to find regions of guest physical address space
which are unused and can be used to create grant/foreign mappings
instead of wasting real pages from the domain memory for
establishing these mappings. The problem with the current Linux
on Xen on Arm behaviour is if we want to map some guest memory
regions in advance or to perform cache mappings in the backend
we might run out of memory in the host (see XSA-300).
This of course, depends on the both host and guest memory sizes.

The "unallocated space" can't be figured out precisely by
the domain on Arm without hypervisor involvement:
- not all device I/O regions are known by the time domain starts
     creating grant/foreign mappings
- the Dom0 is not aware of memory regions used for the identity
     mappings needed for the PV drivers to work
In both cases we might end up re-using these regions by
a mistake. So, the hypervisor which maintains the P2M for the domain
is in the best position to provide "unallocated space".

I'm afraid this does not improve the situation.

If a guest follows the advice from XENMEM_get_unallocated_space, and
subsequently a new IO or identity region appears, everything will
explode, because the "safe area" wasn't actually safe.

The safe range *must* be chosen by the toolstack, because nothing else
can do it safely or correctly.

The problem is how do you size it? In particular, a backend may map
multiple time the same page (for instance if the page is granted twice).

The number of mapped grants is limited by the size of the maptrack table
in Xen, which is a toolstack input to the domaincreate hypercall.
Therefore, the amount of space required is known and bounded.

There are a handful of other frames required in the current ABI (shared
info, vcpu info, etc).

The areas where things do become fuzzy is things like foreign mappings,
acquire_resource, etc for the control domain, which are effectively
unbounded from the domain's point of view.

For those, its entirely fine to say "here 128G of safe mapping space" or
so.  Even the quantity of mapping dom0 can make is limited by the shadow
memory pool and the number of pagetables Xen is willing to expend on the
second stage translation tables.

FWIW, on Arm, we don't have shadow memory pool.

Where do you take 2nd level page table memory from then?

From xenheap directly. And yes, I know this may lead to other issues. But that's a known missing features that so far no-one tackled.

Cheers,

--
Julien Grall



 


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