Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC/RFT PATCH v2 1/3] arm/arm64: pageattr: add set_memory_nc

[Andrew Jones]

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 06:08:30PM -0700, Mario Smarduch wrote:
> On 05/18/2015 08:53 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 02:46:44PM +0100, Andrew Jones wrote:
> >> On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 01:05:09PM +0200, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> >>> On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 01:31:52PM +0200, Andrew Jones wrote:
> >>>> Provide a method to change normal, cacheable memory to non-cacheable.
> >>>> KVM will make use of this to keep emulated device memory regions
> >>>> coherent with the guest.
> >>>>
> >>>> Signed-off-by: Andrew Jones <address@hidden>
> >>>
> >>> Reviewed-by: Christoffer Dall <address@hidden>
> >>>
> >>> But you obviously need Russell and Will/Catalin to ack/merge this.
> >>
> >> I guess this patch is going to go away in the next round. You've
> >> pointed out that I screwed stuff up royally with my over eagerness
> >> to reuse code. I need to reimplement change_memory_common, but a
> >> version that takes an mm, which is more or less what I did in the
> >> last version of this series, back when I was pinning pages.
> > 
> > I kept wondering what this patch and the next one are doing with
> > set_memory_nc(). Basically you were trying to set the cache attributes
> > for the kernel linear mapping or kmap address (in the 32-bit arm case,
> > which is removed anyway on kunmap).
> > 
> > What you need is changing the attributes of the user mapping as accessed
> > by Qemu but I don't think simply re-implementing change_memory_common()
> > would work, you probably need to pin the pages in memory as well.
> > Otherwise, the kernel may remove such pages and, when bringing them
> > back, would set the default cacheability attributes.
> > 
> > Another way would be to split the vma containing the non-cacheable
> > memory so that you get a single vma with the vm_page_prot as
> > Non-cacheable.
> > 
> > Yet another approach could be for KVM to mmap the necessary memory for
> > Qemu via a file_operations.mmap call (but that's only for ranges outside
> > the guest "RAM").
> 
> I think this option with a basic loadable driver
> that allocates non-cachable/pinned pages for QEMU to mmap()
> may provide a reference point to build on. If that covers
> all the cases then perhaps move to more generic solution. This
> should be quicker to implement and test.

I've pulled together a different approach for experimentation. I added a
new mmap/mprotect prot flag, like what was done for the powerpc SAO bit
(see commit b845f313d78e4e "mm: Allow architectures to define additional
protection bits" and commit ef3d3246a0d06 " powerpc/mm: Add Strong Access
Ordering support"). So far I've only tested with a simple test program that
forks and messes around with mapping shared memory in different ways. With
some cache flushing added to set_pte_at on memattr changes, then it seems
to work pretty well.

Now I'll start experimenting with QEMU again to see if the "map QEMU's
memory as noncacheable" approach makes any sense at all. If it does,
then I'm not sure we want to do it with mprotect, but I could clean up
the patches and post them for discussion. The main problems I see with it
are the need to define a new PROT_ flag, and the fact that it might not
be a good idea for userspace to have this capability in the first place,
at least not for MAP_SHARED regions.

> 
> I wonder if kernel mm will ever have a reason
> to create a cacheable mapping even if the pages are pinned?
> Like reading /dev/mem although that's not a likely case here.

Actually for a version with pinned pages, then I think this one
http://www.spinics.net/lists/kvm-arm/msg14021.html
is a good start. There are some problems with it, but I can fix
them in order for it to be useful for experimenting with QEMU. It
suffers from the Device-nGnRnE issue Peter and Alex pointed out, and
I also see that I'm using the wrong address in there as well for the
dcache flush, because I'm using kvm_flush_dcache_pte(*ptep) in
set_page_uncached, which ends up using page_address(page). I should
just do __flush_dcache_area(addr, PAGE_SIZE), instead.

Thanks,
drew