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Re: [Xen-devel] write page table in user mode

To: "Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@xxxxxxxxx>, "Su, Disheng" <disheng.su@xxxxxxxxx>, Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] write page table in user mode
From: Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 02 Feb 2008 15:58:00 +0000
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On 2/2/08 15:29, "Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> It's said to be a forward progress issue, that instruction page of faulting
> IP falls into mapped virtual range by same L1 as the target frame it tries
> to update. So the implication is that the unshadow unfortunately
> succeeds. Then re-execute faulting IP causes another shadow fault and
> unshadowed L1 is reshadowed again. Finally unshadow and reshadow
> conducts a dead trap. (Disheng is in Chinese New Year vacation now
> and hope I didn't make thing wrong :-)
> 
> For this special case, I guess we may add some postponed track info,
> like if previously unshadowed page triggers a reshadow immediately
> without any other faults in between, we then disable that heuristics on
> this special page. Possibly we can do page-based heuristics, like adding
> one flag with bit set indicating disallowed heuristics?

Ugh, it would be much nicer to remove the unshadow-on-user-access heuristic
entirely. We just need to do enough testing to ensure it doesn't harm
performance in other cases we care about. I really don't know how much we
rely on that heuristic these days. If we can show good performance without
it then I'm happy to remove it (if Tim also agrees).

 -- Keir



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