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xen-devel
Re: [Xen-devel] Xen's use of PAT and PV guests
On 03/30/2010 10:56 AM, Ian Campbell wrote:
I had a patch ages ago (which I have now lost) that caused the kernel to
read back the PAT MSR after writing it and try and locate a suitable
entry for each cache setting it was interested in (with fallbacks as
appropriate) to use dynamically thereafter.
This has the nice property that Linux could write what it really wanted
to the PAT register but it would then read and use whatever it actually
ended up with.
I started to implement something like that, but stopped and decided to
do a much simpler hack. I wanted to make sure that make_pte and pte_val
are proper inverses of each other, so pte_val needs to do the reverse
mapping from xen pte pat flags -> linux pte pat flags. Given that the
only difference between Xen and Linux is whether _PAGE_PWT means WT or
WC, it is easy to do the mapping forward and back.
But hugetlbfs adds the complication that it ends up constructing ptes
via the pte operations (which makes logical sense), but on x86 that's a
mess because the meaning of _PAGE_PAT changes to _PAGE_PSE on level
2/3/4 entries, and there's no way of knowing what level we're looking at.
At the moment I'm winging it by ignoring _PAGE_PAT in make_pte, and hope
that nobody wants to do pte_val on a hugetlbfs pte...
Looks like the proper fix is to stop hugetlbfs from using mk_pte, and
add a mk_huge_tlb instead, and have the x86 version use the pmd operations.
I'm not sure that this scheme is at all upstreamable though.
I don't see why not; it would all be hidden away in the Xen code, and
maintains the normal x86 illusion. It's just a matter of hooking
wrmsr, make_pte and pte_val, which we do already.
J
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