On Fri, Jun 14, 2024 at 09:06:30AM -0500, Tom Lendacky wrote:

On 6/13/24 09:56, Borislav Petkov wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 04:41:00PM +0300, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:

quoted

It is easy enough to do. See the patch below.

Thanks, will have a look.

quoted

But I am not sure if I can justify it properly. If someone doesn't really
need 5-level paging, disabling it at compile-time would save ~34K of
kernel code with the configuration.

Is it worth saving ~100 lines of code?

Well, it goes both ways: is it worth saving ~34K kernel text and for that make
the code a lot less conditional, more readable, contain less ugly ifdeffery,

Won't getting rid of the config option cause 5-level to be used by default
on all platforms that support it? The no5lvl command line option would have
to be used to get 4-level paging at that point.

Yes, there won't be compile-time option to disable 5-level paging.

Is it a problem?

We benchmarked it back when 5-level paging got introduced and were not able
to see a measurable difference between 4- and 5-level paging on the same
machine. There's some memory overhead on more page table, but it shouldn't
be a show stopper.

I would prefer to get 5-level paging enabled if the machine supports it.
"no5lvl" cmdline option can be useful for debug or if your workload is
somehow special.

-- 
  Kiryl Shutsemau / Kirill A. Shutemov