On Tue 10-09-19 07:42:43, Alexander Duyck wrote: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 5:42 AM Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > I wanted to review "mm: Introduce Reported pages" just realize that I > > have no clue on what is going on so returned to the cover and it didn't > > really help much. I am completely unfamiliar with virtio so please bear > > with me. > > > > On Sat 07-09-19 10:25:03, Alexander Duyck wrote: > > [...] > > > This series provides an asynchronous means of reporting to a hypervisor > > > that a guest page is no longer in use and can have the data associated > > > with it dropped. To do this I have implemented functionality that allows > > > for what I am referring to as unused page reporting > > > > > > The functionality for this is fairly simple. When enabled it will allocate > > > statistics to track the number of reported pages in a given free area. > > > When the number of free pages exceeds this value plus a high water value, > > > currently 32, it will begin performing page reporting which consists of > > > pulling pages off of free list and placing them into a scatter list. The > > > scatterlist is then given to the page reporting device and it will perform > > > the required action to make the pages "reported", in the case of > > > virtio-balloon this results in the pages being madvised as MADV_DONTNEED > > > and as such they are forced out of the guest. After this they are placed > > > back on the free list, > > > > And here I am reallly lost because "forced out of the guest" makes me > > feel that those pages are no longer usable by the guest. So how come you > > can add them back to the free list. I suspect understanding this part > > will allow me to understand why we have to mark those pages and prevent > > merging. > > Basically as the paragraph above mentions "forced out of the guest" > really is just the hypervisor calling MADV_DONTNEED on the page in > question. So the behavior is the same as any userspace application > that calls MADV_DONTNEED where the contents are no longer accessible > from userspace and attempting to access them will result in a fault > and the page being populated with a zero fill on-demand page, or a > copy of the file contents if the memory is file backed. As I've said I have no idea about virt so this doesn't really tell me much. Does that mean that if somebody allocates such a page and tries to access it then virt will handle a fault and bring it back? -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs
