[PATCH RFC 0/4] kvm/mm: Allow GUP to respond to non fatal signals

From: Peter Xu
Date: Thu Jun 16 2022 - 21:41:58 EST


[Marked as RFC for now]

One issue was reported that libvirt won't be able to stop the virtual
machine using QMP command "stop" during a paused postcopy migration [1].

It won't work because "stop the VM" operation requires the hypervisor to
kick all the vcpu threads out using SIG_IPI in QEMU (which is translated to
a SIGUSR1). However since during a paused postcopy, the vcpu threads are
hang death at handle_userfault() so there're simply not responding to the
kicks. Further, the "stop" command will further hang the QMP channel.

The mm has facility to process generic signal (FAULT_FLAG_INTERRUPTIBLE),
however it's only used in the PF handlers only, not in GUP. Unluckily, KVM
is a heavy GUP user on guest page faults. It means we won't be able to
interrupt a long page fault for KVM fetching guest pages with what we have
right now.

I think it's reasonable for GUP to only listen to fatal signals, as most of
the GUP users are not really ready to handle such case. But actually KVM
is not such an user, and KVM actually has rich infrastructure to handle
even generic signals, and properly deliver the signal to the userspace.
Then the page fault can be retried in the next KVM_RUN.

This patchset added FOLL_INTERRUPTIBLE to enable FAULT_FLAG_INTERRUPTIBLE,
and let KVM be the first one to use it.

Tests
=====

I created a postcopy environment, pause the migration by shutting down the
network to emulate a network failure (so the handle_userfault() will stuck
for a long time), then I tried three things:

(1) Sending QMP command "stop" to QEMU monitor,
(2) Hitting Ctrl-C from QEMU cmdline,
(3) GDB attach to the dest QEMU process.

Before this patchset, all three use case hang. After the patchset, all
work just like when there's not network failure at all.

Please have a look, thanks.

[1] https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/1052

Peter Xu (4):
mm/gup: Add FOLL_INTERRUPTIBLE
kvm: Merge "atomic" and "write" in __gfn_to_pfn_memslot()
kvm: Add new pfn error KVM_PFN_ERR_INTR
kvm/x86: Allow to respond to generic signals during slow page faults

arch/arm64/kvm/mmu.c | 5 ++--
arch/powerpc/kvm/book3s_64_mmu_hv.c | 5 ++--
arch/powerpc/kvm/book3s_64_mmu_radix.c | 5 ++--
arch/x86/kvm/mmu/mmu.c | 19 ++++++++----
include/linux/kvm_host.h | 21 ++++++++++++-
include/linux/mm.h | 1 +
mm/gup.c | 33 ++++++++++++++++++---
virt/kvm/kvm_main.c | 41 ++++++++++++++++----------
virt/kvm/kvm_mm.h | 6 ++--
virt/kvm/pfncache.c | 2 +-
10 files changed, 104 insertions(+), 34 deletions(-)

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2.32.0