[PATCH RFC 0/2] KVM: use RCU to allow dynamic kvm->vcpus array
From: Marc Zyngier <hidden>
Date: 2017-08-18 14:22:47
Also in:
kvm, linux-mips, linux-s390, lkml
On 18/08/17 15:10, Radim Kr?m?? wrote:
2017-08-17 21:17+0200, Alexander Graf:quoted
On 17.08.17 16:54, Radim Kr?m?? wrote:quoted
2017-08-17 09:04+0200, Alexander Graf:quoted
What if we just sent a "vcpu move" request to all vcpus with the new pointer after it moved? That way the vcpu thread itself would be responsible for the migration to the new memory region. Only if all vcpus successfully moved, keep rolling (and allow foreign get_vcpu again).I'm not sure if I understood this. You propose to cache kvm->vcpus in vcpu->vcpus and do an extensions of this, int vcpu_create(...) { if (resize_needed(kvm->vcpus)) { old_vcpus = kvm->vcpus kvm->vcpus = make_bigger(kvm->vcpus)if (kvm->vcpus != old_vcpus) :)quoted
kvm_make_all_cpus_request(kvm, KVM_REQ_UPDATE_VCPUS)IIRC you'd need some manual bookkeeping to ensure that all users have switched to the new array. Or set the KVM_REQUEST_WAIT flag :).Absolutely. I was thinking about synchronous execution, which might need extra work to expedite halted VCPUs. Letting the last user free it is plausible and would need more protection against races.quoted
quoted
free(old_vcpus) } vcpu->vcpus = kvm->vcpus } with added extra locking, (S)RCU, on accesses that do not come from VCPUs (irqfd and VM ioctl)?Well, in an ideal world we wouldn't have any users to vcpu structs outside of the vcpus obviously. Every time we do, we should either reconsider whether the design is smart and if we think it is, protect them accordingly.And there would be no linear access to all VCPUs. :) The main user of kvm->vcpus is kvm_for_each_vcpu(), which is well suited for a list, so we can change the design of kvm_for_each_vcpu() to use a list head in struct kvm_vcpu with head/tail in struct kvm. (The list is trivial to make lockless as we only append.) This would allow more flexibility with the remaining uses.quoted
Maybe even hard code separate request mechanisms for the few cases where it's reasonable?All non-kvm_for_each_vcpu() seem to need accesss outside of VCPU scope. We have few awkward accesses that can be handled keeping track of kvm state and all remaining uses need some kind of "int -> struct kvm_vcpu" mapping, where the integer is arbitrary. All users of kvm_get_vcpu_by_id() need a vcpu_id mapping, but hijack kvm->vcpus for O(1) access if lucky, with fallback to kvm_for_each_vcpu(). Adding a vcpu_id mapping seems reasonable. s390 __floating_irq_kick() and x86 kvm_irq_delivery_to_apic() are keeping a bitmap for kvm->vcpus indices. They want compact indices, which cannot be provided by vcpu_id mapping. I think that MIPS and ARM use the index in kvm->vcpus for userspace communication, which looks dangerous as userspace shouldn't know the position. Not much we can do because of that.
I think (at least for the ARM side) that we could switch whatever use we have of the index to a vcpu_id. The worse offender (as far as I can remember) is when injecting an interrupt, and that could be creatively re-purposed to describe an affinity value in a backward compatible way. Probably. N, -- Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny...