Rusty Russell wrote: > On Mon, 2007-07-23 at 13:27 +0300, Avi Kivity wrote: > >> Having an address_space (like your patch does) is remarkably simple, and >> requires few hooks from the current vm. However using existing vmas >> mapped by the user has many advantages: >> >> - compatible with s390 requirements >> - allows the user to use hugetlbfs pages, which have a performance >> advantage using ept/npt (but which are unswappable) >> - allows the user to map a file (which can be regarded as way to specify >> the swap device) >> - better ingration with the rest of the vm >> > > You don't need to expose the vmas. You just have userspace point out > the start+len of each region of memory it wants the guest to be able to > access, and the address it wants it to appear in the guest. > > This is a slight superset of what lguest does in two ways: > > 1) my guest address == user address, but I'm looking at adding an offset > so I don't have to link the launcher binary specially. > 2) I have only one contiguous region of guest-physical memory, since I > can place device memory immediately above "normal" mem. > >
My intent was to allow userspace to establish assign a virtual address range into a memory slot. So long as you don't do swapping, all is simple, since you can do a get_user_pages() on initialization or when installing a shadow pte. But if you want to swap, you need: - a way to transfer the dirty bit from the shadow ptes to the struct page - a way to let the vm rmap know that there are shadow ptes that point to the page in addition to Linux ptes. These shadow ptes may be in a different format than Linux ptes. - a different tlb invalidation method with ASIDs It's not going to be simple. -- Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to panic. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ kvm-devel mailing list kvm-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kvm-devel