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xen-devel
Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] turn off writable page tables
Keir Fraser wrote:
It would allow set_pte() to switch between explicit queuing and
'direct' writing. We moved away from the former a few years back as
doing it everywhere made a mess of the generic Linux mm code and it
was hard to reason whether our patches were correct. I guess doing it
for the most important subset of mm routines is not so bad. It's a
shame that, although many set_pte() call sites could determine
statically whether or not they will batch, we'd end up with a dynamic
run-time test everywhere (unless I'm mistaken) -- I wonder if that has
a measurable cost?
We've actually seen a benefit for this, despite the cost of the
non-static parameters, for both VMI Linux with shadow pagetables on ESX
and VMI Linux with direct pagetables on Xen. Turns out that as long as
the call EIP is predictable, the parameters do not necessarily need to
be so, and modern processors are getting much better at branch prediction.
Doing explicit batching exactly where it counts, under protection of
locks, so that SMP safety is guaranteed turns out to be really easy, as
well as a nice win.
Zach
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