Re: [Xen-devel] Shadow Page Tables in Xen

[Gianluca Guida <glguida@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 1:37 PM, priya sehgal <priyagps@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Thanks Tim.
>> Why are you interested?  Do you have a project in
>> mind?
>
> We have a course project, in which we have to improve the performance of live 
> migration for HVM guests. It seems that to support live migration, all the 
> page table entries in the shadow page table are marked as write protected, so 
> as to know which pages are dirtied and to be sent to the other machine. 
> Since, there will be many page faults leading to performance degradation, we 
> want to reduce these page faults. In our course project, we are supposed to 
> form groups of pages and if any page in the group hits the page fault (due to 
> write-protection), we mark all the pages in the group as RW. This way we can 
> reduce the page faults.
>

Have you actually measured this? I think that the major cause of page
faults and VM slowdown is -- rather than page faults on write access
-- the fact that we blow the shadow pagetables away everytime we clean
the dirty bitmap, and this requires a long operation to remove from
top to bottom all reference counts and reconstructing later the shadow
pagetables on the next memory accesses.

Thanks,
Gianluca

-- 
It was a type of people I did not know, I found them very strange and
they did not inspire confidence at all. Later I learned that I had been
introduced to electronic engineers.
                                                  E. W. Dijkstra

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