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[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v2 19/20] x86/mem_sharing: reset a fork
On 19/12/2019 17:23, Tamas K Lengyel wrote: This falls under a "minimum maintained". This wasn't clear from your previous statement stating there will be no support.On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 9:58 AM Julien Grall <julien@xxxxxxx> wrote:Hi, On 19/12/2019 16:11, Tamas K Lengyel wrote:Well, this is only an experimental system that's completely disabled by default. Making the assumption that people who make use of it will know what they are doing I think is fair.I assume that if you submit to upstream this new hypercall then there is longer plan to have more people to use it and potentially making "stable". If not, then it raises the question why this is pushed upstream...It's being pushed upstream so other people can make use of it, even if it's not "production quality". Beyond what is being sent here there are no longer term plans from Intel (at this point) to support this in any way.So if this is merged, who is going to maintain it?It falls under mem_sharing for which I'm listed as "Odd Fixes" maintainer, which I do in my personal free time. The status there isn't changing with this new feature.The alternative would be that we just release a fork (or just the patches) and walk away. If the Xen community wants to make the announcement that only code that will have long term support and is "stable" is accepted upstream that's IMHO drastically going to reduce people's interest to share anything.Sharing is one thing, but if this code is not at least a minimum maintained then it is likely the code will not be functional in a year time.Surprisingly mem_sharing had only minor bitrots in the last ~5 years in which time it has been pretty much abandoned. [...] But if others feel that strongly as well about having to have continuation for this I don't really mind adding it.I don't think the continuation work is going to be difficult, but if you want to delay it, then the minimum is to document such assumptions for your users.I just don't see a use for it because it will never actually execute.That's a very narrow view of how your hypercall can be used. I know that you said that should only be called early, but imagine for a moment the user decide to call it much later in the fork process.So to me it just looks like unnecessary dead glue.Try to call the hypercall after enough deduplication happen (maybe 20min). Alternatively, give me access to your machine with the code and I can show how it can be misused ;).It will hang for a bit for sure and Linux in dom0 will complain that a CPU is stuck. But it will eventually finish. It's not like it's doing all that much. And anyway, if you notice that happening when you call it it will be an obvious clue that you shouldn't be using it under the situation you are using it under. Having continuation would hide that. I am not going to argue more as this is an experimental feature. But this will be a showstopper if we ever consider mem_sharing to be supported (or even security supported). Meanwhile please document the assumption. But documenting the assumption under which this hypercall should execute is perfectly fair.You might want to think how the interface would look like with the preemption. So the day you decide to introduce preemption you don't have to create a new hypercall.Why would you need to introduce a new hypercall if preemption becomes necessary? This is not a stable interfaces. It can be removed/changed completely from one Xen release to the next. Sorry, I didn't realize the mem_sharing code was not a stable interfaces. Cheers, -- Julien Grall _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.xenproject.org/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel
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