Re: [PATCH RFC 00/15] KVM: Dirty ring interface

From: Jason Wang
Date: Wed Dec 04 2019 - 05:40:22 EST



On 2019/11/30 äå5:34, Peter Xu wrote:
Branch is here:https://github.com/xzpeter/linux/tree/kvm-dirty-ring

Overview
============

This is a continued work from Lei Cao<lei.cao@xxxxxxxxxxx> and Paolo
on the KVM dirty ring interface. To make it simple, I'll still start
with version 1 as RFC.

The new dirty ring interface is another way to collect dirty pages for
the virtual machine, but it is different from the existing dirty
logging interface in a few ways, majorly:

- Data format: The dirty data was in a ring format rather than a
bitmap format, so the size of data to sync for dirty logging does
not depend on the size of guest memory any more, but speed of
dirtying. Also, the dirty ring is per-vcpu (currently plus
another per-vm ring, so total ring number is N+1), while the dirty
bitmap is per-vm.

- Data copy: The sync of dirty pages does not need data copy any more,
but instead the ring is shared between the userspace and kernel by
page sharings (mmap() on either the vm fd or vcpu fd)

- Interface: Instead of using the old KVM_GET_DIRTY_LOG,
KVM_CLEAR_DIRTY_LOG interfaces, the new ring uses a new interface
called KVM_RESET_DIRTY_RINGS when we want to reset the collected
dirty pages to protected mode again (works like
KVM_CLEAR_DIRTY_LOG, but ring based)

And more.


Looks really interesting, I wonder if we can make this as a library then we can reuse it for vhost.

Thanks