Message-ID: <20250904144240.GO470103@nvidia.com>
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2025 11:42:40 -0300
From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@...dia.com>
To: Pratyush Yadav <pratyush@...nel.org>
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Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 29/30] luo: allow preserving memfd

On Thu, Sep 04, 2025 at 02:57:35PM +0200, Pratyush Yadav wrote:

> I don't think it matters if they are preserved or not. The serialization
> and deserialization is independent of that. You can very well create a
> KHO array that you don't KHO-preserve. On next boot, you can still use
> it, you just have to be careful of doing it while scratch-only. Same as
> we do now.

The KHO array machinery itself can't preserve its own memory
either.

> For the _hypervisor_ live update case, sure. Though even there, I have a
> feeling we will start seeing userspace components on the hypervisor use
> memfd for stashing some of their state. 

Sure, but don't make excessively sparse memfds for kexec use, why
should that be hard?

> applications. Think big storage nodes with memory in order of TiB. Those
> can use a memfd to back their caches so on a kernel upgrade the caches
> don't have to be re-fetched. Sparseness is to be expected for such use
> cases.

Oh? I'm surpised you'd have sparseness there. sparseness seems like
such a weird feature to want to rely on :\

> But perhaps it might be a better idea to come up with a mechanism for
> the kernel to discover which formats the "next" kernel speaks so it can
> for one decide whether it can do the live update at all, and for another
> which formats it should use. Maybe we give a way for luod to choose
> formats, and give it the responsibility for doing these checks?

I have felt that we should catalog the formats&versions the kernel can
read/write in some way during kbuild.

Maybe this turns into a sysfs directory of all the data with an
'enable_write' flag that luod could set to 0 to optimize.

And maybe this could be a kbuild report that luod could parse to do
this optimization.

And maybe distro/csps use this information mechanically to check if
version pairs are kexec compatible.

Which re-enforces my feeling that the formats/version should be first
class concepts, every version should be registered and luo should
sequence calling the code for the right version at the right time.

Jason

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