Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] Next gen kvm api

[Avi Kivity]

On 02/16/2012 10:41 PM, Scott Wood wrote:
> >>> Sharing the data structures is not need.  Simply synchronize them before
> >>> lookup, like we do for ordinary registers.
> >>
> >> Ordinary registers are a few bytes. We're talking of dozens of kbytes here.
> > 
> > A TLB way is a few dozen bytes, no?
>
> I think you mean a TLB set... 

Yes, thanks.

> but the TLB (or part of it) may be fully
> associative.

A fully associative TLB has to be very small.

> On e500mc, it's 24 bytes for one TLB entry, and you'd need 4 entries for
> a set of TLB0, and all 64 entries in TLB1.  So 1632 bytes total.

Syncing this every time you need a translation (for gdb or the monitor)
is trivial in terms of performance.

> Then we'd need to deal with tracking whether we synchronized one or more
> specific sets, or everything (for migration or debug TLB dump).  The
> request to synchronize would have to come from within the QEMU MMU code,
> since that's the point where we know what to ask for (unless we
> duplicate the logic elsewhere).  I'm not sure that reusing the standard
> QEMU MMU code for individual debug address translation is really
> simplifying things...
>
> And yes, we do have fancier hardware coming fairly soon for which this
> breaks (TLB0 entries can be loaded without host involvement, as long as
> there's a translation from guest physical to physical in a separate
> hardware table).  It'd be reasonable to ignore TLB0 for migration (treat
> it as invalidated), but not for debug since that may be where the
> translation we're interested in resides.
>

So with this new hardware, the always-sync API breaks.

-- 
I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this
signature is too narrow to contain.