• David Matlack's avatar
    KVM: x86/mmu: Do not recover dirty-tracked NX Huge Pages · eb298605
    David Matlack authored
    Do not recover (i.e. zap) an NX Huge Page that is being dirty tracked,
    as it will just be faulted back in at the same 4KiB granularity when
    accessed by a vCPU. This may need to be changed if KVM ever supports
    2MiB (or larger) dirty tracking granularity, or faulting huge pages
    during dirty tracking for reads/executes. However for now, these zaps
    are entirely wasteful.
    
    In order to check if this commit increases the CPU usage of the NX
    recovery worker thread I used a modified version of execute_perf_test
    [1] that supports splitting guest memory into multiple slots and reports
    /proc/pid/schedstat:se.sum_exec_runtime for the NX recovery worker just
    before tearing down the VM. The goal was to force a large number of NX
    Huge Page recoveries and see if the recovery worker used any more CPU.
    
    Test Setup:
    
      echo 1000 > /sys/module/kvm/parameters/nx_huge_pages_recovery_period_ms
      echo 10 > /sys/module/kvm/parameters/nx_huge_pages_recovery_ratio
    
    Test Command:
    
      ./execute_perf_test -v64 -s anonymous_hugetlb_1gb -x 16 -o
    
            | kvm-nx-lpage-re:se.sum_exec_runtime      |
            | ---------------------------------------- |
    Run     | Before             | After               |
    ------- | ------------------ | ------------------- |
    1       | 730.084105         | 724.375314          |
    2       | 728.751339         | 740.581988          |
    3       | 736.264720         | 757.078163          |
    
    Comparing the median results, this commit results in about a 1% increase
    CPU usage of the NX recovery worker when testing a VM with 16 slots.
    However, the effect is negligible with the default halving time of NX
    pages, which is 1 hour rather than 10 seconds given by period_ms = 1000,
    ratio = 10.
    
    [1] https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20221019234050.3919566-2-dmatlack@google.com/Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Matlack <dmatlack@google.com>
    Message-Id: <20221103204421.1146958-1-dmatlack@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
    eb298605
mmu.c 191 KB