[Xen-devel] Re: blktap: Sync with XCP, dropping zero-copy.

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>]

On 11/17/2010 12:21 PM, Daniel Stodden wrote:
> And, like all granted frames, not owning them implies they are not
> resolvable via mfn_to_pfn, thereby failing in follow_page, thereby gup()
> without the VM_FOREIGN hack.

Hm, I see.  Well, I wonder if using _PAGE_SPECIAL would help (it is put
on usermode ptes which don't have a backing struct page).  After all,
there's no fundamental reason why it would need a pfn; the mfn in the
pte is what's actually needed to ultimately generate a DMA descriptor.

> Correct me if I'm mistaken. I used to be quicker looking up stuff on
> arch-xen kernels, but I think fundamental constants of the Xen universe
> didn't change since last time.

No, but Linux has.

> [
> Part of the reason why blktap *never* frees those pages, apart from
> being slightly greedy, are deadlock hazards when writing those nodes in
> dom0 through the pagecache, as dom0 might. You need memory pools on the
> datapath to guarantee progress under pressure. That got pretty ugly
> after 2.6.27, btw.
> ]

That's what mempools are intended to solve.

> In any case, let's skip trying what happens if a thundering herd of
> several hundred userspace disks tries gfp()ing their grant slots out of
> dom0 without without arbitration.

I'm not against arbitration, but I don't think that's something that
should be implemented as part of a Xen driver.

>>> I guess we've been meaning the same thing here, unless I'm
>>> misunderstanding you. Any pfn does, and the balloon pagevec allocations
>>> default to order 0 entries indeed. Sorry, you're right, that's not a
>>> 'range'. With a pending re-xmit, the backend can find a couple (or all)
>>> of the request frames have count>1. It can flip and abandon those as
>>> normal memory. But it will need those lost memory slots back, straight
>>> away or next time it's running out of frames. As order-0 allocations.
>> Right.  GFP_KERNEL order 0 allocations are pretty reliable; they only
>> fail if the system is under extreme memory pressure.  And it has the
>> nice property that if those allocations block or fail it rate limits IO
>> ingress from domains rather than being crushed by memory pressure at the
>> backend (ie, the problem with trying to allocate memory in the writeout
>> path).
>>
>> Also the cgroup mechanism looks like an extremely powerful way to
>> control the allocations for a process or group of processes to stop them
>> from dominating the whole machine.
> Ah. In case it can be put to work to bind processes allocating pagecache
> entries for dirtying to some boundary, I'd be really interested. I think
> I came across it once but didn't take the time to read the docs
> thoroughly. Can it?

I'm not sure about dirtyness - it seems like something that should be
within its remit, even if it doesn't currently have it.

The cgroup mechanism is extremely powerful, now that I look at it.  You
can do everything from setting block IO priorities and QoS parameters to
CPU limits.

    J

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