On 24.02.21 10:48, David Hildenbrand wrote:
A virtio-mem device manages a memory region in guest physical address space, represented as a single (currently large) memory region in QEMU, mapped into system memory address space. Before the guest is allowed to use memory blocks, it must coordinate with the hypervisor (plug blocks). After a reboot, all memory is usually unplugged - when the guest comes up, it detects the virtio-mem device and selects memory blocks to plug (based on resize requests from the hypervisor).Memory hot(un)plug consists of (un)plugging memory blocks via a virtio-mem device (triggered by the guest). When unplugging blocks, we discard the memory - similar to memory balloon inflation. In contrast to memory ballooning, we always know which memory blocks a guest may actually use - especially during a reboot, after a crash, or after kexec (and during hibernation as well). Guests agreed to not access unplugged memory again, especially not via DMA. The issue with vfio is, that it cannot deal with random discards - for this reason, virtio-mem and vfio can currently only run mutually exclusive. Especially, vfio would currently map the whole memory region (with possible only little/no plugged blocks), resulting in all pages getting pinned and therefore resulting in a higher memory consumption than expected (turning virtio-mem basically useless in these environments). To make vfio work nicely with virtio-mem, we have to map only the plugged blocks, and map/unmap properly when plugging/unplugging blocks (including discarding of RAM when unplugging). We achieve that by using a new notifier mechanism that communicates changes. It's important to map memory in the granularity in which we could see unmaps again (-> virtio-mem block size) - so when e.g., plugging consecutive 100 MB with a block size of 2 MB, we need 50 mappings. When unmapping, we can use a single vfio_unmap call for the applicable range. We expect that the block size of virtio-mem devices will be fairly large in the future (to not run out of mappings and to improve hot(un)plug performance), configured by the user, when used with vfio (e.g., 128MB, 1G, ...), but it will depend on the setup. More info regarding virtio-mem can be found at: https://virtio-mem.gitlab.io/ v7 is located at: [email protected]:davidhildenbrand/qemu.git virtio-mem-vfio-v7
Gentle ping. -- Thanks, David / dhildenb
