Re: [PATCH v12 04/11] kvm/x86: remove kvm memblock dependency

From: Thomas Gleixner
Date: Fri Jul 06 2018 - 06:51:13 EST


On Fri, 6 Jul 2018, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Jul 2018, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > On 06/07/2018 11:45, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > >> One possibility is to introduce another layer of indirection: in
> > >> addition to the percpu pvclock data, add a percpu pointer to the pvclock
> > >> data and initialize it to point to a page-aligned variable in BSS. CPU0
> > >> (used by vDSO) doesn't touch the pointer and keeps using the BSS
> > >> variable, APs instead redirect the pointer to the percpu data.
> > > Yeah, thought about that, but the extra indirection is ugly. Instead of
> > > using per cpu data, I just can allocate the memory _after_ the allocators
> > > are up and running and use a single page sized static __initdata for the
> > > early boot.
> >
> > Either works for me. Assembly-wise, the indirection should be more or
> > less the same as what we have now; even more efficient because it
> > accesses a percpu pointer instead of computing it based on
> > smp_processor_id().
>
> Good point. Let me try that.

Duh, that either requires a static key or a static PER_CPU pointer thingy,
which then wastes 8 bytes per cpu instead of 64 byte if unused.

Thanks,

tglx