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Re: [Xen-devel] [XenSummit 2017] Notes from the 5-level-paging session



On 20/07/17 11:10, Yu Zhang wrote:


On 7/17/2017 6:53 PM, Juergen Gross wrote:
Hey,

I took a few notes at the 5-level-paging session at the summit.
I hope there isn't any major stuff missing...

Participants (at least naming the active ones): Andrew Cooper,
Jan Beulich, Yu Zhang and myself (the list is just from my memory).

The following topics have been discussed in the session:


1. Do we need support for 5-level-paging PV guests?

There is no urgent need for 5-level-paging PV guests for the
following reasons:

- Guests >64TB (which is the upper limit for 4-level-paging Linux)
   can be PVH or HVM.

- A 5-level-paging host supports up to 4 PB physical memory. A
   4-level-paging PV-Dom0 can support that theoretically: the M2P map
   for 4 PB memory needs 8 TB space, which just fits into the hypervisor
   reserved memory area in the Linux kernel. Any other hypervisor data
   and/or code can live in the additionally available virtual space of
   the 5-level-paging mode.

There was agreement we don't need support of 5-level-paging PV guests
right now. There is a need, however, to support 4-level-paging PV
guests located anywhere in the 52-bit physical space of a 5-level-paging
host (right now they would have to be in the bottom 64 TB as the Linux
kernel is masking away any MFN bit above 64 TB). I will send patches to
support this.


2. Do we need 5-level-paging shadow mode support?

While strictly required for PV guests only and no 5-level-paging PV
guests are to be supported, we will need 5-level-paging shadow mode in
the long run. This is necessary because even for a 4-level-paging PV
guest (or a 32-bit PV guest) the processor will run in 5-level-paging
mode on a huge host as switching between the paging modes is rather
complicated and should be avoided. It is much easier to run shadow
mode for the whole page table tree instead for two subtrees only.

OTOH the first step when implementing 5-level-paging in the hypervisor
doesn't require shadow mode to be working, so it can be omitted in the
beginning.


3. Is it possible to support 5-level-paging in Xen via a specific
    binary for the first step?

Yu Zhang asked for implementing 5-level-paging via a Kconfig option
instead of dynamical switching at boot time for the first prototype.
This request was accepted in order to reduce the complexity of the
initial patches. Boot time switching should be available for the
final solution, though.


I hope I didn't miss anything.

Thanks a lot for the your help and for the summary, Juergen.
And I really need to say thank you for quite a lot people who joined this discussion. It's quite
enlightening. :)

One thing I can recall is about the wr{fs,gs}base for pv guest. IIRC, our agreement is to turn off the FSGSBASE in cr4 for PV guests and try to emulate the rd{fs,gs}base and wr{fs,gs}base in the
#UD handler.

But please correct me if I misunderstood. :)

Yes, that matches my understanding.

A second piece of emulation which needs to happen is to modify the #PF handler to notice if a PV guest takes a fault with %cr2 being va57 canonical but not va48 canonical. In this case, we need to decode the instruction as far as working out the segment of the memory operand, and inject #GP[0]/#SS[0] as appropriate.

~Andrew

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