Re: [PATCH] KVM: x86/mmu: Add "never" option to allow sticky disabling of nx_huge_pages

[Like Xu]

On 2023/6/15 03:07, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 14, 2023, Luiz Capitulino wrote:
> > On 2023-06-13 19:21, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> >
> > > On Thu, 01 Jun 2023 17:58:59 -0700, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > > > Add a "never" option to the nx_huge_pages module param to allow userspace
> > > > to do a one-way hard disabling of the mitigation, and don't create the
> > > > per-VM recovery threads when the mitigation is hard disabled.  Letting
> > > > userspace pinky swear that userspace doesn't want to enable NX mitigation
> > > > (without reloading KVM) allows certain use cases to avoid the latency
> > > > problems associated with spawning a kthread for each VM.
> > > >
> > > > [...]
> > >
> > > Applied to kvm-x86 mmu.  I kept the default as "auto" for now, as that can go on
> > > top and I don't want to introduce that change this late in the cycle.  If no one
> > > beats me to the punch (hint, hint ;-) ), I'll post a patch to make "never" the
> > > default for unaffected hosts so that we can discuss/consider that change for 6.6.
> >
> > Thanks Sean, I agree with the plan. I could give a try on the patch if you'd like.
>
> Yes please, thanks!

As a KVM/x86 *feature*, playing with splitting and reconstructing large
pages have other potential user scenarios, e.g. for performance test
comparisons in a easier approach, not just for itlb_multihit mitigation.

On unaffected machines (ICX and later), nx_huge_pages is already "N",
and turning it into "never" doesn't help materially in the mitigation
implementation, but loses flexibility.

IMO, the real issue here is that the kernel thread "kvm-nx-lpage-
recovery" is created unconditionally. We also need to be aware of the
existence of this commit 084cc29f8bbb ("KVM: x86/MMU: Allow NX huge
pages to be disabled on a per-vm basis").

One of the technical proposals is to defer kvm_vm_create_worker_thread()
to kvm_mmu_create() or kvm_init_mmu(), based on 
kvm->arch.disable_nx_huge_pages, even until guest paging mode is enabled
on the first vcpu.

Is this step worth taking ?