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Re: [Xen-devel] Regarding page table management changes from Xen v1to Xe

To: Ian Pratt <m+Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] Regarding page table management changes from Xen v1to Xen v2 (and v3)
From: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:15:25 -0500
Cc: xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Himanshu Raj <rhim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Ian Pratt wrote:
In another example, mmapped access to a file, the new approach will incur these two extra faults for every page fault required to bring a file page to page cache, right?

No, these singleton updates on the Linux demand fault path are issued
with the update_va_mapping hypercall. This is possible because the
virtual address that the pte maps is known, so its possible for Xen to
use a linear pagetable to do the update rather than creating an
on-demand mapping to the domain's pagetable page. This is an important
optimization on 32b where Xen address space is tight.

Just to make sure I understand, we do the linear mapping for performance (so we don't have to keep remapping) but not necessarily to save VA space since the linear mapping uses a fixed amount of space.

Is there any reason that we would strictly require a linear mapping (other than it being convenient)?

Thanks,

Anthony Liguori

Ian

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