Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH RFC V9 4/5] xen, libxc: Request page fault injection via libxc

[Razvan Cojocaru <rcojocaru@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/10/2014 11:48 AM, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> On 10/09/2014 09:09, Razvan Cojocaru wrote:
>> On 09/09/2014 09:38 PM, Tamas K Lengyel wrote:
>>>     > But ultimately, as Tim said, you're basically just *hoping* that it
>>>     > won't take too long to happen to be at the hypervisor when the proper
>>>     > condition happens.  If the process in question isn't getting many
>>>     > interrupts, or is spending the vast majority of its time in the
>>>     > kernel, you may end up waiting an unbounded amount of time to be able
>>>     > to "catch" it in user mode.  It seems like it would be better to find
>>>     > a reliable way to trap on the return into user mode, in which case you
>>>     > wouldn't need to have a special "wait for this complicated event to
>>>     > happen" call at all, would you?
>>>
>>>     Indeed, but it is assumed that the trap injection request is being made
>>>     by the caller in the proper context (when it knows that the condition
>>>     will be true sooner rather than later).
>>>
>>>
>>> How is it known that the condition will be true soon? Some more
>>> information on what you consider 'proper context' would be valuable.
>> It's actually pretty simple for us: the application always requests an
>> injection when the guest is already in the address space of the
>> interesting application, and in user mode.
> 
> Does this mean that you always request a pagefault as a direct result of
> a mem_event, when the vcpu is in blocked the correct context?

Yes, exactly.

> If so, how about extending the mem_event response mechanism with
> trap/fault information?

For this particular case, that is indeed a very good suggestion -
however, things may change. From what I understand, it is likely that in
the future we (or somebody else doing memory introspection) will need to
request a page fault injection in other cases. The risks described above
will of course exist in that case, but they are acceptable.


Thanks,
Razvan Cojocaru

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