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RE: [Xen-devel] pointers in hcalls


xen-devel-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 02/08/2006 12:14:01 AM:

> On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 20:20 -0500, Reiner Sailer wrote:
> >
> > The acm hypercalls uses pointers when setting and reading the policy
> > from the hypervisor and for dumping statistics. A policy might not
> > necessarily be less than one page.
> >
> > I don't remember the conversation on the Xen summit and probably
> > wasn't involved. Would you mind summarizing briefly the discussion?
>
> (Please CC me on replies.)
>
> The domains (especially the management tools in dom0) are passing
> virtual pointers into the hypervisor.
>
> This assumes that the hypervisor is running in the same address space as
> the userland tools. That assumption is not valid on PPC (we run in real
> mode). One other port (x86-64 VT iirc) has the same problem, but since
> an x86 MMU tablewalk is pretty straightforward, they do that to
> translate the address by hand. This is not feasible on PPC.
>
> It would dramatically simplify the problem if these memory areas were
> limited to one page. Once you go over that, the area could be machine
> discontiguous, which greatly complicates Xen's copy_to/from_user().


I wonder whether we could not implement a wrapper for the copy_from_user function that copies the passed data on a page-by-page basis for those arrays that stretch multiple pages?

 Stefan

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