linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v12 6/8] mm: support reporting free page blocks

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Date:   Wed, 19 Jul 2017 10:13:12 +0200
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
To:     Wei Wang <wei.w.wang@...el.com>
Cc:     "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, qemu-devel@...gnu.org,
        virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org, kvm@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-mm@...ck.org, david@...hat.com, cornelia.huck@...ibm.com,
        akpm@...ux-foundation.org, mgorman@...hsingularity.net,
        aarcange@...hat.com, amit.shah@...hat.com, pbonzini@...hat.com,
        liliang.opensource@...il.com, virtio-dev@...ts.oasis-open.org,
        yang.zhang.wz@...il.com, quan.xu@...yun.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v12 6/8] mm: support reporting free page blocks

On Tue 18-07-17 10:12:14, Wei Wang wrote:
[...]
> Probably I should have included the introduction of the usages in
> the log. Hope it is not too later to explain here:

Yes this should have been described in the cover.
 
> Live migration needs to transfer the VM's memory from the source
> machine to the destination round by round. For the 1st round, all the VM's
> memory is transferred. From the 2nd round, only the pieces of memory
> that were written by the guest (after the 1st round) are transferred. One
> method that is popularly used by the hypervisor to track which part of
> memory is written is to write-protect all the guest memory.
> 
> This patch enables the optimization of the 1st round memory transfer -
> the hypervisor can skip the transfer of guest unused pages in the 1st round.

All you should need is the check for the page reference count, no?  I
assume you do some sort of pfn walk and so you should be able to get an
access to the struct page.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs