Thanks Tim.
> Why are you interested? Do you have a project in
> mind?
We have a course project, in which we have to improve the performance of live
migration for HVM guests. It seems that to support live migration, all the page
table entries in the shadow page table are marked as write protected, so as to
know which pages are dirtied and to be sent to the other machine. Since, there
will be many page faults leading to performance degradation, we want to reduce
these page faults. In our course project, we are supposed to form groups of
pages and if any page in the group hits the page fault (due to
write-protection), we mark all the pages in the group as RW. This way we can
reduce the page faults.
This is based on some hueristic that if a page is written, its immediate
neighbors will also be written.
My concern was that since we will be touching the same shadow page table and
marking its PTEs as RO or RW during different epochs we should not break
something existing.
Priya.I
--- On Tue, 4/21/09, Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] Shadow Page Tables in Xen
> To: "priya sehgal" <priyagps@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: "xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 2:07 PM
> Hi,
>
> At 20:34 +0100 on 20 Apr (1240259658), priya sehgal wrote:
> > I was going through the memory management in Xen and
> little confused
> > about shadow page tables for HVM guest and how they
> work.
>
> Why are you interested? Do you have a project in
> mind?
>
> > Few of my questions are :
> > 1. A shadow page table, is a copy of the guest page
> table, with actual machine frame numbers (MFN), as against
> the physical page number(PFN) in case of guests.
> > Do the shadow page tables write protect each of the
> PTE it contains, or only the pages containing the "guest
> page table" are write protected (to check if the guest has
> modified any entry)?
>
> They write-protect all pagetables and some other things but
> not all of
> memory; that wouldn't be very useful.
>
> > 2. I know that live migration is supported on xen, but
> not sure if it works for HVM guests. In this case also, xen
> will need to keep a shadow page table, which should detect
> which pages have been modified since the last time the pages
> were migrated. For this, shadow page table should mark all
> the PTEs as write protected. Does xen implement live
> migration of HVM guests in this way ?
> > If yes, then is this shadow table same as the one used
> in (1), or there are multiple copies of the shadow tables
> for different purposes?
>
> There's only one set of shadows, since the MMU can only use
> one at a
> time.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tim.
>
> > Thanks.
> > Priya
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Xen-devel mailing list
> > Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
>
> --
> Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Principal Software Engineer, Citrix Systems (R&D) Ltd.
> [Company #02300071, SL9 0DZ, UK.]
>
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