to synchronize page import/export with the I/O for paging. For example you can actually
fault in a page that is currently under paging I/O. What do you do? import (so that the
guest can run) or export (so that the I/O will work). As this turned out to be harder then
we though we decided to defer paging to a later point in time.
I don't quite see the issue yet. If you page out, the page will
automatically (on access) be converted to !secure/encrypted memory. If
the UV/guest wants to access it, it will be automatically converted to
secure/unencrypted memory. If you have concurrent access, it will be
converted back and forth until one party is done.
IO does not trigger an export on an imported page, but an error
condition in the IO subsystem. The page code does not read pages through
Ah, that makes it much clearer. Thanks!
the cpu, but often just asks the device to read directly and that's
where everything goes wrong. We could bounce swapping, but chose to pin
for now until we find a proper solution to that problem which nicely
integrates into linux.
How hard would it be to
1. Detect the error condition
2. Try a read on the affected page from the CPU (will will automatically
convert to encrypted/!secure)
3. Restart the I/O
I assume that this is a corner case where we don't really have to care
about performance in the first shot.
A proper automatic conversion should make this work. What am I missing?
As we do not want to rely on the userspace to do the mlock this is now done in the kernel.
I wonder if we could come up with an alternative (similar to how we
override VM_MERGEABLE in the kernel) that can be called and ensured in
the kernel. E.g., marking whole VMAs as "don't page" (I remember
something like "special VMAs" like used for VDSOs that achieve exactly
that, but I am absolutely no expert on that). That would be much nicer
than pinning all pages and remembering what you pinned in huge page
arrays ...
It might be more worthwhile to just accept one or two releases with
pinning and fix the root of the problem than design a nice stopgap.
Quite honestly, to me this feels like a prototype hack that deserves a
proper solution first. The issue with this hack is that it affects user
space (esp. MADV_DONTNEED no longer working correctly). It's not just
something you once fix in the kernel and be done with it.
Btw. s390 is not alone with the problem and we'll try to have another
discussion tomorrow with AMD to find a solution which works for more
than one architecture.
Let me know if there was an interesting outcome.
--
Thanks,
David / dhildenb
