On 23.11.2012, at 23:13, Paul Mackerras <pau...@samba.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 04:47:45PM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote: >> >> On 22.11.2012, at 10:28, Paul Mackerras wrote: >> >>> Currently, if the guest does an H_PROTECT hcall requesting that the >>> permissions on a HPT entry be changed to allow writing, we make the >>> requested change even if the page is marked read-only in the host >>> Linux page tables. This is a problem since it would for instance >>> allow a guest to modify a page that KSM has decided can be shared >>> between multiple guests. >>> >>> To fix this, if the new permissions for the page allow writing, we need >>> to look up the memslot for the page, work out the host virtual address, >>> and look up the Linux page tables to get the PTE for the page. If that >>> PTE is read-only, we reduce the HPTE permissions to read-only. >> >> How does KSM handle this usually? If you reduce the permissions to R/O, how >> do you ever get a R/W page from a deduplicated one? > > The scenario goes something like this: > > 1. Guest creates an HPTE with RO permissions. > 2. KSM decides the page is identical to another page and changes the > HPTE to point to a shared copy. Permissions are still RO. > 3. Guest decides it wants write access to the page and does an > H_PROTECT hcall to change the permissions on the HPTE to RW. > > The bug is that we actually make the requested change in step 3. > Instead we should leave it at RO, then when the guest tries to write > to the page, we take a hypervisor page fault, copy the page and give > the guest write access to its own copy of the page. > > So what this patch does is add code to H_PROTECT so that if the guest > is requesting RW access, we check the Linux PTE to see if the > underlying guest page is RO, and if so reduce the permissions in the > HPTE to RO. But this will be guest visible, because now H_PROTECT doesn't actually mark the page R/W in the HTAB, right? So the flow with this patch is: - guest page permission fault - guest does H_PROTECT to mark page r/w - H_PROTECT doesn't do anything - guest returns from permission handler, triggers write fault 2 questions here: How does the host know that the page is actually r/w? How does this work on 970? I thought page faults always go straight to the guest there. Alex -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
