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

Re: [PATCH v2 0/6] gnttab: add per-domain controls



Hi Roger,

On 22/09/2021 14:39, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 01:57:02PM +0500, Julien Grall wrote:


On 22/09/2021 13:21, Roger Pau Monne wrote:
Hello,

Hi Roger,

First patch on the series is a trivial change to xenconsoled in order to
use xenforeignmemory stable library in order to map the shared console
ring instead of the unstable libxc interface. It's reviewed and ready to
go in.

Patches 2 and 3 allow setting the host wide command line `gnttab` option
on a per domain basis. That means selecting the max allowed grant table
version and whether transitive grants are allowed.

The last 3 patches attempt to implement support for creating guests
without a grant table. This requires some changes to xenstored in order
to partially support guests without a valid ring interface, as the lack
of grant table will prevent C xenstored from mapping the shared ring.
Note this is not an issue for Ocaml xenstored, as it still uses the
foreign memory interface to map the shared ring, and thus won't notice
the lack of grant table support on the domain.

I find a bit odd that the Xenstore support is conditional to whether grant
table is available. Are you expecting domains with no grant table to have no
PV drivers (including PV shutdown)?

I don't really expect much, as having guests without grant table is a
developer option right now, if someone wants to make use of them for
any reason it would need some thought.

The other option would be my first proposal to restore foreign mapping
of the xenstore ring on that case:

https://lore.kernel.org/xen-devel/20210917154625.89315-6-roger.pau@xxxxxxxxxx/

But it's also arguable that a guest not having a grant table should
also likely prevent foreign mapping attempts. Plus such foreign
mapping won't work from stubdomains.

There is another option: extend the acquire hypercall to allow xenstored domain to map the xenstore interface. This would require more work, but at least it would avoid the interesting dependency on the grant table.


I'm fine with dropping those patches if they turn out to be too
controversial, I think it's an interesting option to be able to
disable the grant table, but I don't have a full picture of how that
could be used in practice. Maybe others have and would be willing to
pick this up.

I think the current approach is probably OK as a developper option. However, we should at least document in the option that disabling the grant-table will also disable Xenstore (anything else?) support when using C Xenstored.

It might also be worth to clearly state in the doc that this is only intended for developer use and not supported.

Cheers,

--
Julien Grall



 


Rackspace

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