Re: [PATCHv11 1/9] mm: Add support for unaccepted memory

From: Tom Lendacky
Date: Tue May 16 2023 - 15:44:28 EST


On 5/13/23 17:04, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
UEFI Specification version 2.9 introduces the concept of memory
acceptance. Some Virtual Machine platforms, such as Intel TDX or AMD
SEV-SNP, require memory to be accepted before it can be used by the
guest. Accepting happens via a protocol specific to the Virtual Machine
platform.

There are several ways kernel can deal with unaccepted memory:

1. Accept all the memory during the boot. It is easy to implement and
it doesn't have runtime cost once the system is booted. The downside
is very long boot time.

Accept can be parallelized to multiple CPUs to keep it manageable
(i.e. via DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT), but it tends to saturate
memory bandwidth and does not scale beyond the point.

2. Accept a block of memory on the first use. It requires more
infrastructure and changes in page allocator to make it work, but
it provides good boot time.

On-demand memory accept means latency spikes every time kernel steps
onto a new memory block. The spikes will go away once workload data
set size gets stabilized or all memory gets accepted.

3. Accept all memory in background. Introduce a thread (or multiple)
that gets memory accepted proactively. It will minimize time the
system experience latency spikes on memory allocation while keeping
low boot time.

This approach cannot function on its own. It is an extension of #2:
background memory acceptance requires functional scheduler, but the
page allocator may need to tap into unaccepted memory before that.

The downside of the approach is that these threads also steal CPU
cycles and memory bandwidth from the user's workload and may hurt
user experience.

The patch implements #1 and #2 for now. #2 is the default. Some
workloads may want to use #1 with accept_memory=eager in kernel
command line. #3 can be implemented later based on user's demands.

Support of unaccepted memory requires a few changes in core-mm code:

- memblock has to accept memory on allocation;

- page allocator has to accept memory on the first allocation of the
page;

Memblock change is trivial.

The page allocator is modified to accept pages. New memory gets accepted
before putting pages on free lists. It is done lazily: only accept new
pages when we run out of already accepted memory. The memory gets
accepted until the high watermark is reached.

EFI code will provide two helpers if the platform supports unaccepted
memory:

- accept_memory() makes a range of physical addresses accepted.

- range_contains_unaccepted_memory() checks anything within the range
of physical addresses requires acceptance.

Signed-off-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> # memblock
Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>
---
drivers/base/node.c | 7 ++
fs/proc/meminfo.c | 5 ++
include/linux/mm.h | 19 +++++
include/linux/mmzone.h | 8 ++
mm/internal.h | 1 +
mm/memblock.c | 9 +++
mm/mm_init.c | 7 ++
mm/page_alloc.c | 173 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
mm/vmstat.c | 3 +
9 files changed, 232 insertions(+)


diff --git a/mm/internal.h b/mm/internal.h
index 68410c6d97ac..b1db7ba5f57d 100644
--- a/mm/internal.h
+++ b/mm/internal.h
@@ -1099,4 +1099,5 @@ struct vma_prepare {
struct vm_area_struct *remove;
struct vm_area_struct *remove2;
};
+

Looks like an unintentional change.

#endif /* __MM_INTERNAL_H */
diff --git a/mm/memblock.c b/mm/memblock.c
index 3feafea06ab2..50b921119600 100644
--- a/mm/memblock.c
+++ b/mm/memblock.c
@@ -1436,6 +1436,15 @@ phys_addr_t __init memblock_alloc_range_nid(phys_addr_t size,
*/
kmemleak_alloc_phys(found, size, 0);
+ /*
+ * Some Virtual Machine platforms, such as Intel TDX or AMD SEV-SNP,
+ * require memory to be accepted before it can be used by the
+ * guest.
+ *
+ * Accept the memory of the allocated buffer.
+ */
+ accept_memory(found, found + size);

I'm not an mm or memblock expert, but do we need to worry about freed memory from memblock_phys_free() being possibly doubly accepted? A double acceptance will trigger a guest termination on SNP.

Thanks,
Tom

+
return found;
}