On 04/06/2018 12:07 PM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
I'm not sure we can create something which works on both kvm and xen. The memory management model is quite different ... On xen the hypervisor manages all memory. Guests can allow other guests to access specific pages (using grant tables). In theory any guest <=> guest communication is possible. In practice is mostly guest <=> dom0 because guests access their virtual hardware that way. dom0 is the priviledged guest which owns any hardware not managed by xen itself. Xen guests can ask the hypervisor to update the mapping of guest physical pages. They can ballon down (unmap and free pages). They can ballon up (ask the hypervisor to map fresh pages). They can map pages exported by other guests using grant tables. xen-zcopy makes heavy use of this. It balloons down, to make room in the guest physical address space, then goes map the exported pages there, finally composes a dma-buf. On kvm qemu manages all guest memory. qemu also has all guest memory mapped, so a grant-table like mechanism isn't needed to implement virtual devices. qemu can decide how it backs memory for the guest. qemu propagates the guest memory map to the kvm driver in the linux kernel. kvm guests have some control over the guest memory map, for example they can map pci bars wherever they want in their guest physical address space by programming the base registers accordingly, but unlike xen guests they can't ask the host to remap individual pages. Due to qemu having all guest memory mapped virtual devices are typically designed to have the guest allocate resources, then notify the host where they are located. This is where the udmabuf idea comes from: Guest tells the host (qemu) where the gem object is, and qemu then can create a dmabuf backed by those pages to pass it on to other processes such as the wayland display server. Possibly even without the guest explicitly asking for it, i.e. export the framebuffer placed by the guest in the (virtual) vga pci memory bar as dma-buf. And I can imagine that this is useful outsize virtualization too. I fail to see any common ground for xen-zcopy and udmabuf ...
Does the above mean you can assume that xen-zcopy and udmabuf can co-exist as two different solutions? And what about hyper-dmabuf? Thank you, Oleksandr
