linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 2/4] x86: always initialize xen-swiotlb when xen-pcifront is enabling

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Message-ID: <c5defff8-882e-3482-0de1-e50a4bcdfa99@suse.com>
Date:   Mon, 22 May 2023 10:37:09 +0200
From:   Juergen Gross <jgross@...e.com>
To:     Marek Marczykowski-Górecki 
        <marmarek@...isiblethingslab.com>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>
Cc:     Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@...nel.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>, Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
        Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...ux.intel.com>, x86@...nel.org,
        "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>, Ben Skeggs <bskeggs@...hat.com>,
        Karol Herbst <kherbst@...hat.com>,
        Lyude Paul <lyude@...hat.com>, xen-devel@...ts.xenproject.org,
        iommu@...ts.linux.dev, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        nouveau@...ts.freedesktop.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/4] x86: always initialize xen-swiotlb when xen-pcifront
 is enabling

On 19.05.23 12:10, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
> On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 06:04:05AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>> On Thu, May 18, 2023 at 08:18:39PM +0200, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
>>> On Thu, May 18, 2023 at 03:42:51PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>>> Remove the dangerous late initialization of xen-swiotlb in
>>>> pci_xen_swiotlb_init_late and instead just always initialize
>>>> xen-swiotlb in the boot code if CONFIG_XEN_PCIDEV_FRONTEND is enabled.
>>>>
>>>> Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>
>>>
>>> Doesn't it mean all the PV guests will basically waste 64MB of RAM
>>> by default each if they don't really have PCI devices?
>>
>> If CONFIG_XEN_PCIDEV_FRONTEND is enabled, and the kernel's isn't booted
>> with swiotlb=noforce, yes.
> 
> That's "a bit" unfortunate, since that might be significant part of the
> VM memory, or if you have a lot of VMs, a significant part of the host
> memory - it quickly adds up.
> While I would say PCI passthrough is not very common for PV guests, can
> the decision about xen-swiotlb be delayed until you can enumerate
> xenstore to check if there are any PCI devices connected (and not
> allocate xen-swiotlb by default if there are none)? This would
> still not cover the hotplug case (in which case, you'd need to force it
> with a cmdline), but at least you wouldn't loose much memory just
> because one of your VMs may use PCI passthrough (so, you have it enabled
> in your kernel).
> Please remember that guest kernel is not always under full control of
> the host admin, so making guests loose 64MB of RAM always, in default
> setup isn't good for customers of such VMs...
> 

In normal cases PCI passthrough in PV guests requires to start the guest
with e820_host=1. So it should be rather easy to limit allocating the
64MB in PV guests to the cases where the memory map has non-RAM regions
especially in the first 1MB of the memory.

This will cover even hotplug cases. The only case not covered would be a
guest started with e820_host=1 even if no PCI passthrough was planned.
But this should be rather rare (at least I hope so).


Juergen

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