mmu-notifiers: core

cddb8a5c · Andrea Arcangeli <[email protected]> · 2008-07-28 15:46:29 -07:00

With KVM/GFP/XPMEM there isn't just the primary CPU MMU pointing to pages.
 There are secondary MMUs (with secondary sptes and secondary tlbs) too.
sptes in the kvm case are shadow pagetables, but when I say spte in
mmu-notifier context, I mean "secondary pte".  In GRU case there's no
actual secondary pte and there's only a secondary tlb because the GRU
secondary MMU has no knowledge about sptes and every secondary tlb miss
event in the MMU always generates a page fault that has to be resolved by
the CPU (this is not the case of KVM where the a secondary tlb miss will
walk sptes in hardware and it will refill the secondary tlb transparently
to software if the corresponding spte is present).  The same way
zap_page_range has to invalidate the pte before freeing the page, the spte
(and secondary tlb) must also be invalidated before any page is freed and
reused.

Currently we take a page_count pin on every page mapped by sptes, but that
means the pages can't be swapped whenever they're mapped by any spte
because they're part of the guest working set.  Furthermore a spte unmap
event can immediately lead to a page to be freed when the pin is released
(so requiring the same complex and relatively slow tlb_gather smp safe
logic we have in zap_page_range and that can be avoided completely if the
spte unmap event doesn't require an unpin of the page previously mapped in
the secondary MMU).

The mmu notifiers allow kvm/GRU/XPMEM to attach to the tsk->mm and know
when the VM is swapping or freeing or doing anything on the primary MMU so
that the secondary MMU code can drop sptes before the pages are freed,
avoiding all page pinning and allowing 100% reliable swapping of guest
physical address space.  Furthermore it avoids the code that teardown the
mappings of the secondary MMU, to implement a logic like tlb_gather in
zap_page_range that would require many IPI to flush other cpu tlbs, for
each fixed number of spte unmapped.

To make an example: if what happens on the primary MMU is a protection
downgrade (from writeable to wrprotect) the secondary MMU mappings will be
invalidated, and the next secondary-mmu-page-fault will call
get_user_pages and trigger a do_wp_page through get_user_pages if it
called get_user_pages with write=1, and it'll re-establishing an updated
spte or secondary-tlb-mapping on the copied page.  Or it will setup a
readonly spte or readonly tlb mapping if it's a guest-read, if it calls
get_user_pages with write=0.  This is just an example.

This allows to map any page pointed by any pte (and in turn visible in the
primary CPU MMU), into a secondary MMU (be it a pure tlb like GRU, or an
full MMU with both sptes and secondary-tlb like the shadow-pagetable layer
with kvm), or a remote DMA in software like XPMEM (hence needing of
schedule in XPMEM code to send the invalidate to the remote node, while no
need to schedule in kvm/gru as it's an immediate event like invalidating
primary-mmu pte).

At least for KVM without this patch it's impossible to swap guests
reliably.  And having this feature and removing the page pin allows
several other optimizations that simplify life considerably.

Dependencies:

1) mm_take_all_locks() to register the mmu notifier when the whole VM
   isn't doing anything with "mm".  This allows mmu notifier users to keep
   track if the VM is in the middle of the invalidate_range_begin/end
   critical section with an atomic counter incraese in range_begin and
   decreased in range_end.  No secondary MMU page fault is allowed to map
   any spte or secondary tlb reference, while the VM is in the middle of
   range_begin/end as any page returned by get_user_pages in that critical
   section could later immediately be freed without any further
   ->invalidate_page notification (invalidate_range_begin/end works on
   ranges and ->invalidate_page isn't called immediately before freeing
   the page).  To stop all page freeing and pagetable overwrites the
   mmap_sem must be taken in write mode and all other anon_vma/i_mmap
   locks must be taken too.

2) It'd be a waste to add branches in the VM if nobody could possibly
   run KVM/GRU/XPMEM on the kernel, so mmu notifiers will only enabled if
   CONFIG_KVM=m/y.  In the current kernel kvm won't yet take advantage of
   mmu notifiers, but this already allows to compile a KVM external module
   against a kernel with mmu notifiers enabled and from the next pull from
   kvm.git we'll start using them.  And GRU/XPMEM will also be able to
   continue the development by enabling KVM=m in their config, until they
   submit all GRU/XPMEM GPLv2 code to the mainline kernel.  Then they can
   also enable MMU_NOTIFIERS in the same way KVM does it (even if KVM=n).
   This guarantees nobody selects MMU_NOTIFIER=y if KVM and GRU and XPMEM
   are all =n.

The mmu_notifier_register call can fail because mm_take_all_locks may be
interrupted by a signal and return -EINTR.  Because mmu_notifier_reigster
is used when a driver startup, a failure can be gracefully handled.  Here
an example of the change applied to kvm to register the mmu notifiers.
Usually when a driver startups other allocations are required anyway and
-ENOMEM failure paths exists already.

 struct  kvm *kvm_arch_create_vm(void)
 {
        struct kvm *kvm = kzalloc(sizeof(struct kvm), GFP_KERNEL);
+       int err;

        if (!kvm)
                return ERR_PTR(-ENOMEM);

        INIT_LIST_HEAD(&kvm->arch.active_mmu_pages);

+       kvm->arch.mmu_notifier.ops = &kvm_mmu_notifier_ops;
+       err = mmu_notifier_register(&kvm->arch.mmu_notifier, current->mm);
+       if (err) {
+               kfree(kvm);
+               return ERR_PTR(err);
+       }
+
        return kvm;
 }

mmu_notifier_unregister returns void and it's reliable.

The patch also adds a few needed but missing includes that would prevent
kernel to compile after these changes on non-x86 archs (x86 didn't need
them by luck).

[[email protected]: coding-style fixes]
[[email protected]: fix mm/filemap_xip.c build]
[[email protected]: fix mm/mmu_notifier.c build]
Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <[email protected]>
Cc: Jack Steiner <[email protected]>
Cc: Robin Holt <[email protected]>
Cc: Nick Piggin <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: Kanoj Sarcar <[email protected]>
Cc: Roland Dreier <[email protected]>
Cc: Steve Wise <[email protected]>
Cc: Avi Kivity <[email protected]>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <[email protected]>
Cc: Rusty Russell <[email protected]>
Cc: Anthony Liguori <[email protected]>
Cc: Chris Wright <[email protected]>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <[email protected]>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <[email protected]>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <[email protected]>
Cc: Izik Eidus <[email protected]>
Cc: Anthony Liguori <[email protected]>
Cc: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

Commit

cddb8a5c14aa89810b40495d94d3d2a0faee6619

Parents

7906d00c

Changes

15 files changed · +623 −13