RE: [Xen-devel] Essay on an important Xen decision (long)

["Ian Pratt" <m+Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Just to be thorough, was the shadow paging code a "pure" 
> shadow page table where ever PTE write trapped to the 
> hypervisor or were bulk PMD updates sent to the hypervisor?

All of Xen's pagetable options are able to do high-performance bulk
updates (though its actually typically more important to optimize for
the demand-fault path).
 
There was some quite extensive benchmarking done ~9 months back, and
we're hoping to write it up and submit it somewhere. The algorithms have
evolved a bit since so we need to rerun things.

> I'm surprised there would be a measurable difference with 
> shadow paging as it should only require a potential 
> allocation (which could be fast
> pathed) and in the normal case, a couple extra reads/writes.  
> I would think that cost would be overshadowed by the original 
> cost of the context switch.

Hint: you need to be propagate dirty and accessed bits back to the guest
pagetable.  

> Of course, I guess it wouldn't be that much of a shock to me 
> that the overhead is at least measurable...

It's certainly measureable, and certainly dominates the virtualization
overhead of some workloads. 


Ian

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