Re: [PATCH] KVM: Move gfn_to_pfn_cache invalidation to invalidate_range_end hook

[Sean Christopherson]

On Tue, Aug 06, 2024, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mon, 2024-08-05 at 17:45 -0700, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 05, 2024, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > > From: David Woodhouse <dwmw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Servicing guest pages faults has the same problem, which is why
> > mmu_invalidate_retry_gfn() was added.  Supporting hva-only GPCs made our lives a
> > little harder, but not horrifically so (there are ordering differences regardless).
> > 
> > Woefully incomplete, but I think this is the gist of what you want:
> 
> Hm, maybe. It does mean that migration occurring all through memory
> (indeed, just one at top and bottom of guest memory space) would
> perturb GPCs which remain present.

If that happens with a real world VMM, and it's not a blatant VMM goof, then we
can fix KVM.  The stage-2 page fault path hammers the mmu_notifier retry logic
far more than GPCs, so if a range-based check is inadequate for some use case,
then we definitely need to fix both.

In short, I don't see any reason to invent something different for GPCs.

> > > @@ -849,6 +837,8 @@ static void kvm_mmu_notifier_invalidate_range_end(struct mmu_notifier *mn,
> > >         wake = !kvm->mn_active_invalidate_count;
> > >         spin_unlock(&kvm->mn_invalidate_lock);
> > >  
> > > +       gfn_to_pfn_cache_invalidate(kvm, range->start, range->end);
> > 
> > We can't do this.  The contract with mmu_notifiers is that secondary MMUs must
> > unmap the hva before returning from invalidate_range_start(), and must not create
> > new mappings until invalidate_range_end().
> 
> But in the context of the GPC, it is only "mapped" when the ->valid bit is set. 
> 
> Even the invalidation callback just clears the valid bit, and that
> means nobody is allowed to dereference the ->khva any more. It doesn't
> matter that the underlying (stale) PFN is still kmapped.
> 
> Can we not apply the same logic to the hva_to_pfn_retry() loop? Yes, it
> might kmap a page that gets removed, but it's not actually created a
> new mapping if it hasn't set the ->valid bit.
> 
> I don't think this version quite meets the constraints, and I might
> need to hook *both* the start and end notifiers, and might not like it
> once I get there. But I'll have a go...

I'm pretty sure you're going to need the range-based retry logic.  KVM can't
safely set gpc->valid until mn_active_invalidate_count reaches zero, so if a GPC
refresh comes along after mn_active_invalidate_count has been elevated, it won't
be able to set gpc->valid until the MADV_DONTNEED storm goes away.  Without
range-based tracking, there's no way to know if a previous invalidation was
relevant to the GPC.