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[Xen-devel] Question about monitor_table

To: xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Xen-devel] Question about monitor_table
From: Travis Johnson <tjohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 09:03:03 -0500
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Note: If I don't specify then I'm referring to x86_32 (no PAE). Also I'm reading code from the 3.0 release but the concepts are probably the same.

Could someone help me understand the need for the monitor page table. I
figure that arch_vcpu->guest_table points to a guests L2 page table (PD on x86) and arch_vcpu->shadow_table points to the guest_table's shadow table (if shadowing is turned on) but I don't quite get the purpose of the monitor_table. On x86_32 it seems like it just gets set to the value of the guest table on initialization and I lose track of it after that. I understand Xen needs to trap page table updates but I figured that would be a privileged operation and Xen could trap those accesses through hardware faults or by paravirtualizing through hypercalls (do_mmu_update).

That's a large amount of figuring so if someone could shed some light on the purpose and use of the monitor table I would appreciate it.

Xen is awesome.

-Travis


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