[PATCH v5 0/7] KVM: arm64: pKVM stage-2 mapping and memcache fixes

From: Fuad Tabba

Date: Fri Jul 17 2026 - 09:05:59 EST


Hi folks,

Changes since v4 [1]:
- Restored the permission-fault and dirty-logging memcache top-ups
that v4 dropped. Both fix real bugs.
- Patch 1 uses the anonymous bitfield encoding rather than the
open-coded mask and helpers. (Marc)
- Reshaped the permission-fault top-up to stage the full memcache
under pKVM, not just the mapping object. The object-only form still
returned -ENOMEM and tripped a WARN under the hypervisor's
unconditional min-pages check.
- Re-scoped the dirty-logging top-up to its generic, non-pKVM failure
mode, now that the permission-fault patch covers pKVM.
- Added three adjacent fixes found while going through the series, and
a selftest for the block transitions.
- Patches 1 and 3 keep Bradley's Signed-off-by from v3; my changes
to each are noted in a [tabba: ...] line.

I picked this up while reviewing Bradley's "mapping cache" series [2]:
v4 dropped two fixes from v3 that address real bugs, so I've collected
the three fixes back together, reshaped patch 1 per Marc's review [3],
added a few adjacent fixes I found along the way and a selftest, and am
reposting as v5.

Most of the fixes are in the pKVM stage-2 walker. On a pKVM host a
non-protected guest's stage-2 faults go through pkvm_pgtable_*(), which
diverges from the generic walker in several ways that are bugs: cache
maintenance on non-cacheable mappings (patch 1), a missing memcache
top-up on permission faults that under pKVM still allocate (patch 2), a
full flush walk on FWB hardware (patch 4), a WARN on a guest-reachable
map failure (patch 5), and an eager-split capability whose pKVM backend
is only a stub (patch 6). These affect non-protected guests only, since
dispatch and memcache selection key on the host-global pKVM mode, and
protected guests take no permission faults.

Patch 3 is not pKVM-specific. During dirty logging a non-write
permission fault, an instruction fetch, still needs a page-table page
to split a block, but the memcache top-up is gated on write faults.
That fault path is generic, so the fix is too.

The two memcache top-ups came from sashiko review-bot findings [4][5],
and both check out against the code.

The series is structured as follows:

1: Skip cache maintenance for non-cacheable mappings.
2-3: Top up the memcache for the permission and dirty-logging faults
that force stage-2 block transitions.
4-6: Adjacent pkvm_pgtable_*() fixes: FWB flush early-out, drop a
spurious map WARN, and gate the eager-split capability.
7: Selftest for the block-collapse and block-split transitions.

Testing: the selftest in patch 7 covers the two dirty-logging block
transitions (page->block collapse and block->page split) that patch 2
stages; on the base kernel the collapse oopses the host in
pkvm_pgtable_stage2_map() with a NULL dereference under mmu_lock, and
with the series applied it passes. It is a standalone test rather than
an extension of kvm_page_table_test, whose default anonymous-4K backing
forms no huge-page blocks, so an automated run never exercises these
transitions, and whose worker/stage harness does not fit the multi-stage
logging sequence. Run it with 2M hugepages
reserved and, for the split half, on a CPU with CTR_EL0.DIC == 0 (e.g.
-cpu cortex-a710 under QEMU); it self-skips those otherwise. It also
passes on a non-pKVM host (VHE and nVHE), where patch 3's generic change
applies. The other fixes are not exercised by the selftest and rest on
the analysis in their commit messages: patch 3's fault path is generic
and non-pKVM (under pKVM patch 2 already tops it up, and its failure is
a WARN_ON(!nobjs) in kvm_mmu_memory_cache_alloc(), not a KVM_RUN error),
and patches 1 and 4-6 each need a specific pKVM configuration to hit.

Based on Linux v7.2-rc3 (a13c140cc289).

Cheers,
/fuad

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260701192428.17430-1-include@xxxxxxxxx
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260624160028.15591-1-include@xxxxxxxxx
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/r/86qzllpy1g.wl-maz@xxxxxxxxxx
[4] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260623161545.EA08E1F000E9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
[5] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260623165634.699011F000E9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/

Bradley Morgan (2):
KVM: arm64: Skip cache maintenance for non-cacheable pKVM mappings
KVM: arm64: Top up stage-2 memcache for dirty logging faults

Fuad Tabba (5):
KVM: arm64: Top up the memcache for pKVM permission faults
KVM: arm64: Skip pKVM stage-2 flush when FWB is enabled
KVM: arm64: Don't WARN on pKVM stage-2 map failures
KVM: arm64: Don't advertise eager page splitting under pKVM
KVM: arm64: selftests: Add stage-2 block transition test

arch/arm64/include/asm/kvm_pkvm.h | 8 +-
arch/arm64/kvm/mmu.c | 9 +-
arch/arm64/kvm/pkvm.c | 21 +-
tools/testing/selftests/kvm/Makefile.kvm | 1 +
.../kvm/arm64/stage2_block_transitions.c | 226 ++++++++++++++++++
5 files changed, 254 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/kvm/arm64/stage2_block_transitions.c


base-commit: a13c140cc289c0b7b3770bce5b3ad42ab35074aa
--
2.39.5