Re: [PATCH 00/10] Introduce guestmemfs: persistent in-memory filesystem

[David Hildenbrand]

> 1. Secret hiding: with guestmemfs all of the memory is out of the kernel
> direct map as an additional defence mechanism. This means no
> read()/write() syscalls to guestmemfs files, and no IO to it. The only
> way to access it is to mmap the file.

There are people interested into similar things for guest_memfd.

> 2. No struct page overhead: the intended use case is for systems whose
> sole job is to be a hypervisor, typically for large (multi-GiB) VMs, so
> the majority of system RAM would be donated to this fs. We definitely
> don't want 4 KiB struct pages here as it would be a significant
> overhead. That's why guestmemfs carves the memory out in early boot and
> sets memblock flags to avoid struct page allocation. I don't know if
> hugetlbfs does anything fancy to avoid allocating PTE-level struct pages
> for its memory?

Sure, it's called HVO and can optimize out a significant portion of the 
vmemmap.

> 3. guest_memfd interface: For confidential computing use-cases we need
> to provide a guest_memfd style interface so that these FDs can be used
> as a guest_memfd file in KVM memslots. Would there be interest in
> extending hugetlbfs to also support a guest_memfd style interface?

"Extending hugetlbfs" sounds wrong; hugetlbfs is a blast from the past 
and not something people are particularly keen to extend for such use 
cases. :)

Instead, as Jason said, we're looking into letting guest_memfd own and 
manage large chunks of contiguous memory.

> 4. Metadata designed for persistence: guestmemfs will need to keep
> simple internal metadata data structures (limited allocations, limited
> fragmentation) so that pages can easily and efficiently be marked as
> persistent via KHO. Something like slab allocations would probably be a
> no-go as then we'd need to persist and reconstruct the slab allocator. I
> don't know how hugetlbfs structures its fs metadata but I'm guessing it
> uses the slab and does lots of small allocations so trying to retrofit
> persistence via KHO to it may be challenging.
>
> 5. Integration with persistent IOMMU mappings: to keep DMA running
> across kexec, iommufd needs to know that the backing memory for an IOAS
> is persistent too. The idea is to do some DMA pinning of persistent
> files, which would require iommufd/guestmemfs integration - would we
> want to add this to hugetlbfs?
>
> 6. Virtualisation-specific APIs: starting to get a bit esoteric here,
> but use-cases like being able to carve out specific chunks of memory
> from a running VM and turn it into memory for another side car VM, or
> doing post-copy LM via DMA by mapping memory into the IOMMU but taking
> page faults on the CPU. This may require virtualisation-specific ioctls
> on the files which wouldn't be generally applicable to hugetlbfs.
>
> 7. NUMA control: a requirement is to always have correct NUMA affinity.
> While currently not implemented the idea is to extend the guestmemfs
> allocation to support specifying allocation sizes from each NUMA node at
> early boot, and then having multiple mount points, one per NUMA node (or
> something like that...). Unclear if this is something hugetlbfs would
> want.
>
> There are probably more potential issues, but those are the ones that
> come to mind... That being said, if hugetlbfs maintainers are interested
> in going in this direction then we can definitely look at enhancing
> hugetlbfs.
>
> I think there are two types of problems: "Would hugetlbfs want this
> functionality?" - that's the majority. An a few are "This would be hard
> with hugetlbfs!" - persistence probably falls into this category.

I'm much rather asking myself if you should instead teach/extend the 
guest_memfd concept by some of what you propose here.

At least "guest_memfd" sounds a lot like the "anonymous fd" based 
variant of guestmemfs ;)

Like we have hugetlbfs and memfd with hugetlb pages.

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb