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Re: [Xen-devel] Re: Next steps with pv_ops for Xen

To: Derek Murray <Derek.Murray@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] Re: Next steps with pv_ops for Xen
From: Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:16:24 +0100
Cc: "xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@xxxxxxxxxx>, Juan Quintela <quintela@xxxxxxxxxx>, "Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@xxxxxxxxxx>, Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxxxx>, Glauber de Oliveira Costa <gcosta@xxxxxxxxxx>, Chris Wright <chrisw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, "virtualization@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <virtualization@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Derek Murray wrote:
> I take the blame for that one. I added the hook because, if a process
> were to die whilst holding one or more grants, there were no hooks that
> would make it possible to carry out the grant-unmap. All existing hooks
> on either the device or the VMA were called *after* the PTEs were cleared.

Hmm.  What exactly is the issue here?

This is about *userspace* mappings, right?  As far as I can see from a
quick scan there of the code is an additional kernel space mapping for
the grants and the userspace mapping is optional.  I don't see any
problems with userspace mapping going away without *instant*
notification.  Cleaning up a bit later, called from the
file_ops->release callback maybe, should work ok.

The problem I see with the additional vm_ops callback is that I suspect
you'll have to come up with some *very* good arguments to get it
accepted by the VM (as in "virtual memory") folks and merged mainline.

> It gets better, though. The same hook is used in the version of blktap
> in linux-2.6.18-xen (not, as far as I can see, in the sparse tree for
> xen-3.1-testing):

Oh, I'm thinking more in the direction of killing blktap altogether in
favor of a pure userspace implementation on top of gntdev.

cheers,
  Gerd



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