RE: [Xen-devel] Page cache shared across domain

["Ian Pratt" <m+Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > Another approach is to use a shared interdomain ramdisk and 
> do Execute 
> > In Place (XIP) on the contents.  It's not a full shared page cache, 
> > but it gives you sharing for program text, etc.  I'm implementing 
> > infrastructure to support the dcssblk driver used on IBM zSeries 
> > mainframes, which will give us this functionality.
> 
> Would it make sense to have a Read-Only page type in Xen (if 
> it's not already there), so that pages coming from the 
> blockdev-backend could be made RO by the backend, and the 
> domain would have to CoW them if it needed to modify the contents?

Xen is certainly able to enforce pages as RO, and there have been
several prototypes knocked up over the last couple years that exhibit
this kind of functionality. 

For PV guests its necessary to introduce a new kind of page fault that
requires them to copy-to-write (i.e. they must replace the imutable
'physical' page with one of their own and update all references). This
is exactly the same kind of OS extension that's required by embedded
folk to execute from flash memory (copy into SRAM on writes), so should
hopefully make it into mainstream linux at some point.

Ian
 
> Seems this would allow a shared buffer cache, and also open 
> the door to a voluntary page sharing mechanism.


_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel