Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH RFC v2 1/4] x86/mm: Shadow and p2m changes for PV mem_access

["Aravindh Puthiyaparambil (aravindp)" <aravindp@xxxxxxxxx>]

>> In the PV case step 2 is problematic as the range of pages that belong
>> to the PV guest is unknown to the mem-access listener. I tried adding
>> another PV specific API for setting default access that will walk the
>> page_list and set the shadow_flag to default. But Jan rightly pointed
>> out issues surrounding hypercall preemption / continuation during
>> which, the page_list could be modified. So my current plan is to blow
>> all shadow pages every time the API for setting default access is
>> called. The on the subsequent page-faults where the PTE is marked not
>> present, set the shadow_flag to the default access as part of creating
>> the PTE.
>
>How do you know when this step finishes?  I.e. how can you tell the
>difference between an access field in the shadow_flags that was set before
>you enabled mem_access and one that was set since?

What I was thinking of doing is, in p2m_mem_access_get_entry(), check if PTE 
for the page is marked present and return the access value in the shadow_flags 
if it is. If it is not present, then return the default access value.

>At some point you need some more state - either something resetting the
>shadow_flags (though indeed I don't know how to do that reliably and safely)
>or an epoch counter (which there isn't room for) or some other trick that I
>can't think of right now.

At the moment, I have some code in assign_pages() to reset the shadow_flags to 
the default value. So that will take care of resetting pages assigned to new 
domains.

Thanks,
Aravindh


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