linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] s390/mm: re-enable the shared zeropage for !PV and !skeys KVM guests

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Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:22:13 +0100
From: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@...ux.ibm.com>
To: David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Cc: linux-mm@...ck.org, Janosch Frank <frankja@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Claudio Imbrenda <imbrenda@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Heiko Carstens
 <hca@...ux.ibm.com>, Vasily Gorbik <gor@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com>,
        Alexander Gordeev <agordeev@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Sven Schnelle <svens@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>, kvm@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-s390@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] s390/mm: re-enable the shared zeropage for !PV and
 !skeys KVM guests



Am 21.03.24 um 22:59 schrieb David Hildenbrand:
> commit fa41ba0d08de ("s390/mm: avoid empty zero pages for KVM guests to
> avoid postcopy hangs") introduced an undesired side effect when combined
> with memory ballooning and VM migration: memory part of the inflated
> memory balloon will consume memory.
> 
> Assuming we have a 100GiB VM and inflated the balloon to 40GiB. Our VM
> will consume ~60GiB of memory. If we now trigger a VM migration,
> hypervisors like QEMU will read all VM memory. As s390x does not support
> the shared zeropage, we'll end up allocating for all previously-inflated
> memory part of the memory balloon: 50 GiB. So we might easily
> (unexpectedly) crash the VM on the migration source.
> 
> Even worse, hypervisors like QEMU optimize for zeropage migration to not
> consume memory on the migration destination: when migrating a
> "page full of zeroes", on the migration destination they check whether the
> target memory is already zero (by reading the destination memory) and avoid
> writing to the memory to not allocate memory: however, s390x will also
> allocate memory here, implying that also on the migration destination, we
> will end up allocating all previously-inflated memory part of the memory
> balloon.
> 
> This is especially bad if actual memory overcommit was not desired, when
> memory ballooning is used for dynamic VM memory resizing, setting aside
> some memory during boot that can be added later on demand. Alternatives
> like virtio-mem that would avoid this issue are not yet available on
> s390x.
> 
> There could be ways to optimize some cases in user space: before reading
> memory in an anonymous private mapping on the migration source, check via
> /proc/self/pagemap if anything is already populated. Similarly check on
> the migration destination before reading. While that would avoid
> populating tables full of shared zeropages on all architectures, it's
> harder to get right and performant, and requires user space changes.
> 
> Further, with posctopy live migration we must place a page, so there,
> "avoid touching memory to avoid allocating memory" is not really
> possible. (Note that a previously we would have falsely inserted
> shared zeropages into processes using UFFDIO_ZEROPAGE where
> mm_forbids_zeropage() would have actually forbidden it)
> 
> PV is currently incompatible with memory ballooning, and in the common
> case, KVM guests don't make use of storage keys. Instead of zapping
> zeropages when enabling storage keys / PV, that turned out to be
> problematic in the past, let's do exactly the same we do with KSM pages:
> trigger unsharing faults to replace the shared zeropages by proper
> anonymous folios.
> 
> What about added latency when enabling storage kes? Having a lot of
> zeropages in applicable environments (PV, legacy guests, unittests) is
> unexpected. Further, KSM could today already unshare the zeropages
> and unmerging KSM pages when enabling storage kets would unshare the
> KSM-placed zeropages in the same way, resulting in the same latency.
> 
> Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>

Nice work. Looks good to me and indeed it fixes the memory
over-consumption that you mentioned.

Reviewed-by: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@...ux.ibm.com>
Tested-by: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@...ux.ibm.com>
(can also be seen with virsh managedsave; virsh start)

I guess its too invasive for stable, but I would say it is real fix.