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Re: eliminating 166G limit (was Re: [Xen-devel] Problem with nr_nodes on

Subject: Re: eliminating 166G limit (was Re: [Xen-devel] Problem with nr_nodes on large memory NUMA machine)
From: beth kon <eak@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 03 Dec 2007 14:49:54 -0500
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Has there been any more thought on this subject? The discussion seems to have stalled, and we're hoping to find a way past this 166G limit...

Jan Beulich wrote:

Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 27.11.07 10:21 >>>
On 27/11/07 09:00, "Jan Beulich" <jbeulich@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't get how your netback approach works. The pages we transfer do not
originate from netback, so it has little control over them. And, even if it
did, when we allocate pages for network receive we do not know which
domain's packet will end up in each buffer.
Oh, right, I mixed up old_mfn and new_mfn in netbk_gop_frag(). Nevertheless
netback could take care of this by doing the copying there, as at that point i
already knows the destination domain.
You may not know constraints on that domain's max_mfn though. We could add
an interface to Xen to interrogate that, but generally it's not something we
probably want to expose outside of Xen and the guest itself.

What constraints other than the guest's address size influence its max_mfn?
Of course, if there's anything beyond the address size, then having a way to
obtain the constraint explicitly would be desirable. But otherwise (and as
fallback) using 37 bits (128G) seems quite reasonable.

Personally I think doing it in Xen is perfectly good enough for supporting
this very out-of-date network receive mechanism.
I'm not just concerned about netback here. The interface exists, and other
users might show up and/or exist already. Whether it would be acceptable
for them to do allocation and copying is unknown. You'd therefore either
need a way to prevent future users of the transfer mechanism, or set proper
requirements on its use. I think that placing extra requirements on the user
of the interface is better than introducing extra (possibly hard to reproduce/
recognize/debug) possibilities of failure.
The interface is obsolete.

Then it should be clearly indicated as such, e.g. by a mechanism similar to
deprecated_irq_flag() in Linux 2.6.22. And as a result, its use in netback 
should
then probably be conditional upon an extra config option, which could at once
be used to provide a note to Xen that the feature isn't being used so that the
function could return -ENOSYS and the clipping could be avoided/reverted.

Jan


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--
Elizabeth Kon (Beth)
IBM Linux Technology Center
Open Hypervisor Team
email: eak@xxxxxxxxxx


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