Re: [RFC][Patch v8 0/7] KVM: Guest Free Page Hinting

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 09:02:52PM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 19.02.19 20:58, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 10:06:35AM -0800, Alexander Duyck wrote:
> >>> I tend to like an asynchronous reporting approach as discussed in this
> >>> thread, we would have to see if Nitesh could get it implemented.
> >>
> >> I agree it would be great if it could work. However I have concerns
> >> given that work on this patch set dates back to 2017, major issues
> >> such as working around device assignment have yet to be addressed,
> > 
> > BTW for device assignment to work, your idea of sending
> > data directly to kvm won't work, will it?
> > You need to update userspace so it can update VFIO right?
> > Another blocker for assignment is ability to make holes
> > an an existing mapping - supported by hardware but
> > not by IOMMU drivers.
> 
> I had the exact same thought and then realized that we decided to block
> the balloon in user space until we figured out how to handle this properly.
> 
> I wonder if MADV_FREE behaves differently compared to MADV_DONTNEED when
> finding pinned pages, but I doubt it. Most probably we'll have to
> disable hinting for device assignments as well.

OK but let's recognize it as a bug not a feature.

-- 
MST