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aa85986e71
Mark pages/folios dirty when creating SPTEs to map PFNs into the guest,
not when zapping or modifying SPTEs, as marking folios dirty when zapping
or modifying SPTEs can be extremely inefficient. E.g. when KVM is zapping
collapsible SPTEs to reconstitute a hugepage after disbling dirty logging,
KVM will mark every 4KiB pfn as dirty, even though _at least_ 512 pfns are
guaranteed to be in a single folio (the SPTE couldn't potentially be huge
if that weren't the case). The problem only becomes worse for 1GiB
HugeTLB pages, as KVM can mark a single folio dirty 512*512 times.
Marking a folio dirty when mapping is functionally safe as KVM drops all
relevant SPTEs in response to an mmu_notifier invalidation, i.e. ensures
that the guest can't dirty a folio after access has been removed.
And because KVM already marks folios dirty when zapping/modifying SPTEs
for KVM reasons, i.e. not in response to an mmu_notifier invalidation,
there is no danger of "prematurely" marking a folio dirty. E.g. if a
filesystems cleans a folio without first removing write access, then there
already exists races where KVM could mark a folio dirty before remote TLBs
are flushed, i.e. before guest writes are guaranteed to stop. Furthermore,
x86 is literally the only architecture that marks folios dirty on the
backend; every other KVM architecture marks folios dirty at map time.
x86's unique behavior likely stems from the fact that x86's MMU predates
mmu_notifiers. Long, long ago, before mmu_notifiers were added, marking
pages dirty when zapping SPTEs was logical, and perhaps even necessary, as
KVM held references to pages, i.e. kept a page's refcount elevated while
the page was mapped into the guest. At the time, KVM's rmap_remove()
simply did:
if (is_writeble_pte(*spte))
kvm_release_pfn_dirty(pfn);
else
kvm_release_pfn_clean(pfn);
i.e. dropped the refcount and marked the page dirty at the same time.
After mmu_notifiers were introduced, commit
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| arch | ||
| block | ||
| certs | ||
| crypto | ||
| Documentation | ||
| drivers | ||
| fs | ||
| include | ||
| init | ||
| io_uring | ||
| ipc | ||
| kernel | ||
| lib | ||
| LICENSES | ||
| mm | ||
| net | ||
| rust | ||
| samples | ||
| scripts | ||
| security | ||
| sound | ||
| tools | ||
| usr | ||
| virt | ||
| .clang-format | ||
| .cocciconfig | ||
| .editorconfig | ||
| .get_maintainer.ignore | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .mailmap | ||
| .rustfmt.toml | ||
| COPYING | ||
| CREDITS | ||
| Kbuild | ||
| Kconfig | ||
| MAINTAINERS | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README | ||
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.