Re: [PATCH v2 02/12] KVM: x86: tag the instructions which are usedto write page table

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Wed Aug 03 2011 - 05:25:58 EST


On 08/03/2011 12:24 PM, Xiao Guangrong wrote:
> Maybe it's better to emulate if we can't find a fix for that.
>
> One way would be to emulate every 20 instructions; this breaks us out of the loop but reduces costly emulations to 5%.
>

After much thought about this, may be this optimization is not good since:
- it is little complex
- this optimization is only applied to the instruction emulation caused by #PF
- it does not improve too much:
if we emulate the instruction, we need to do:
- decode instruction
- emulate it
- zap shadow pages
And do this, it can return to the guest, the guest can run the next instruction

if we retry the instruction, we need to do:
- decode instruction
- zap shadow pages
then return to the guest and retry the instruction, however, we will get page fault
again(since the mapping is still read-only), so we will get another VM-exit and need
to do:
# trigger page fault
- handle the page fault and change the mapping to writable
- retry the instruction
until now, the guest can run the next instruction

So, i do not think the new way is better, your opinionï

We can change to writeable and zap in the same exit, no? Basically call page_fault() again after zapping.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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