Re: [PATCH] mmu notifiers #v2

[Izik Eidus]

Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 07:48:06PM +0200, Izik Eidus wrote:
>   
> > Rik van Riel wrote:
> >     
> > > On Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:24:18 +0100
> > > Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > >   
> > >       
> > > > In my basic initial patch I only track the tlb flushes which should be
> > > > the minimum required to have a nice linux-VM controlled swapping
> > > > behavior of the KVM gphysical memory.     
> > > >         
> > > I have a vaguely related question on KVM swapping.
> > >
> > > Do page accesses inside KVM guests get propagated to the host
> > > OS, so Linux can choose a reasonable page for eviction, or is
> > > the pageout of KVM guest pages essentially random?
> > >       
>
> Right, selection of the guest OS pages to swap is partly random but
> wait: _only_ for the long-cached and hot spte entries. It's certainly
> not entirely random.
>   
> As the shadow-cache is a bit dynamic, every new instantiated spte will
> refresh the PG_referenced bit in follow_page already (through minor
> faults). not-present fault of swapped non-present sptes, can trigger
> minor faults from swapcache too and they'll refresh young regular
> ptes.
>
>   
> > right now when kvm remove pte from the shadow cache, it mark as access the 
> > page that this pte pointed to.
> >     
>
> Yes: the referenced bit in the mmu-notifier invalidate case isn't
> useful because it's set right before freeing the page.
>
>   
> > it was a good solution untill the mmut notifiers beacuse the pages were 
> > pinned and couldnt be swapped to disk
> >     
>
> It probably still makes sense for sptes removed because of other
> reasons (not mmu notifier invalidates).
>   
agree
>   
> > so now it will have to do something more sophisticated or at least mark as 
> > access every page pointed by pte
> > that get insrted to the shadow cache....
> >     
>
> I think that should already be the case, see the mark_page_accessed in
> follow_page, isn't FOLL_TOUCH set, isn't it?
>   
yes you are right FOLL_TOUCH is set.
> The only thing we clearly miss is a logic that refreshes the
> PG_referenced bitflag for "hot" sptes that remains instantiated and
> cached for a long time. For regular linux ptes this is done by the cpu
> through the young bitflag. But note that not all architectures have
> the young bitflag support in hardware! So I suppose the swapping of
> the KVM task, is like the swapping any other task but on an alpha
> CPU. It works good enough in practice even if we clearly have room for
> further optimizations in this area (like there would be on archs w/o
> young bit updated in hardware too).
>
> To refresh the PG_referenced bit for long lived hot sptes, I think the
> easiest solution is to chain the sptes in a lru, and to start dropping
> them when memory pressure start. We could drop one spte every X pages
> collected by the VM. So the "age" time factor depends on the VM
> velocity and we totally avoid useless shadow page faults when there's
> no VM pressure. When VM pressure increases, the kvm non-present fault
> will then take care to refresh the PG_referenced bit. This should
> solve the aging-issue for long lived and hot sptes. This should
> improve the responsiveness of the guest OS during "initial" swap
> pressure (after the initial swap pressure, the working set finds
> itself in ram again). So it should avoid some swapout/swapin not
> required jitter during the initial swap. I see this mostly as a kvm
> internal optimization, not strictly related to the mmu notifiers
> though.
>   
ohh i like it, this is cleaver solution, and i guess the cost of the 
vmexits wont be too high if it will
be not too much aggressive....


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