Re: HVM/PVH Balloon crash

[Elliott Mitchell <ehem+xen@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 05:57:10PM +0200, Jan Beulich wrote:
> On 07.09.2021 17:03, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> >  Could be this system is in an
> > intergenerational hole, and some spot in the PVH/HVM code makes an
> > assumption of the presence of NPT guarantees presence of an operational
> > IOMMU.  Otherwise if there was some copy and paste while writing IOMMU
> > code, some portion of the IOMMU code might be checking for presence of
> > NPT instead of presence of IOMMU.
> 
> This is all very speculative; I consider what you suspect not very likely,
> but also not entirely impossible. This is not the least because for a
> long time we've been running without shared page tables on AMD.
> 
> I'm afraid without technical data and without knowing how to repro, I
> don't see a way forward here.

Downtimes are very expensive even for lower-end servers.  Plus there is
the issue the system wasn't meant for development and thus never had
appropriate setup done.

Experimentation with a system of similar age suggested another candidate.
System has a conventional BIOS.  Might some dependancies on the presence
of UEFI snuck into the NPT code?


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