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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/virtual/kvm/mmu.txt | 25 |
1 files changed, 25 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/virtual/kvm/mmu.txt b/Documentation/virtual/kvm/mmu.txt index 42193f20660..89c8a4caf51 100644 --- a/Documentation/virtual/kvm/mmu.txt +++ b/Documentation/virtual/kvm/mmu.txt @@ -210,6 +210,10 @@ Shadow pages contain the following information: A bitmap indicating which sptes in spt point (directly or indirectly) at pages that may be unsynchronized. Used to quickly locate all unsychronized pages reachable from a given page. + mmu_valid_gen: + Generation number of the page. It is compared with kvm->arch.mmu_valid_gen + during hash table lookup, and used to skip invalidated shadow pages (see + "Zapping all pages" below.) clear_spte_count: Only present on 32-bit hosts, where a 64-bit spte cannot be written atomically. The reader uses this while running out of the MMU lock @@ -375,6 +379,27 @@ causes its write_count to be incremented, thus preventing instantiation of a large spte. The frames at the end of an unaligned memory slot have artificially inflated ->write_counts so they can never be instantiated. +Zapping all pages (page generation count) +========================================= + +For the large memory guests, walking and zapping all pages is really slow +(because there are a lot of pages), and also blocks memory accesses of +all VCPUs because it needs to hold the MMU lock. + +To make it be more scalable, kvm maintains a global generation number +which is stored in kvm->arch.mmu_valid_gen. Every shadow page stores +the current global generation-number into sp->mmu_valid_gen when it +is created. Pages with a mismatching generation number are "obsolete". + +When KVM need zap all shadow pages sptes, it just simply increases the global +generation-number then reload root shadow pages on all vcpus. As the VCPUs +create new shadow page tables, the old pages are not used because of the +mismatching generation number. + +KVM then walks through all pages and zaps obsolete pages. While the zap +operation needs to take the MMU lock, the lock can be released periodically +so that the VCPUs can make progress. + Further reading =============== |