Re: [PATCH V5 2/3] libxl/arm: Add handling of extended regions for DomU

[Ian Jackson <iwj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stefano Stabellini writes ("Re: [PATCH V5 2/3] libxl/arm: Add handling of 
extended regions for DomU"):
> On Wed, 6 Oct 2021, Oleksandr wrote:
> > On 06.10.21 14:34, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > > Oleksandr Tyshchenko writes ("[PATCH V5 2/3] libxl/arm: Add handling of
> > > extended regions for DomU"):
> > > > The extended region (safe range) is a region of guest physical
> > > > address space which is unused and could be safely used to create
> > > > grant/foreign mappings instead of wasting real RAM pages from
> > > > the domain memory for establishing these mappings.
> > > Please forgive me for asking this question now, but: why is this
> > > ARM-specific ?
> > 
> > 
> > Sorry, I can't say for sure which x86 mode also suffers from
> > that. I might be wrong, but as I understand that x86 in PVH (and
> > HVM?) mode uses unpopulated memory ranges (which are unused from
> > Linux PoV, actually everything not yet allocated or reserved from
> > "iomem_resource") to create foreign/grant mappings.  So the real
> > RAM pages are not ballooned out to get an physical address space
> > to create these mappings. The problem is that we cannot follow
> > Linux advise which memory ranges are unused on Arm for several
> > reasons, this is why this patch series makes the hypervisor to
> > start allocating and exposing these ranges.

So it sounds like you are saying this is an ARM-specific problem ?
The key being the "several reasons" which you mention.  Are they
ARM-specifc problems.

> Two more things about this being ARM-specific.
> 
> Even if x86 was affected exactly by the same problem, the code to expose
> the safe memory ranges to DomU is arch-specific (currently device tree.)
> 
> Also the code to calculate the safe memory ranges is arch-specific as it
> depends on the DomU memory layout which is arch-specific.

This demonstrates that the implementation is arch-specific.  But one
of libxl's functions is to abstract away implementation details and
provide an interface that can be used to "do the right thing".

Ian.