Message-ID: <2b82fb9f-338e-47e9-bd14-3bdb392dfcbf@kernel.org>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2025 19:25:15 +0100
From: "David Hildenbrand (Red Hat)" <david@...nel.org>
To: "Pratik R. Sampat" <prsampat@....com>, Kiryl Shutsemau <kas@...nel.org>
Cc: linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-coco@...ts.linux.dev,
 linux-efi@...r.kernel.org, x86@...nel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
 tglx@...utronix.de, mingo@...hat.com, bp@...en8.de,
 dave.hansen@...ux.intel.com, ardb@...nel.org, akpm@...ux-foundation.org,
 osalvador@...e.de, thomas.lendacky@....com, michael.roth@....com
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 2/4] mm: Add support for unaccepted memory hotplug

On 12/1/25 18:15, Pratik R. Sampat wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> On 11/28/25 3:34 AM, David Hildenbrand (Red Hat) wrote:
>> On 11/27/25 18:40, Kiryl Shutsemau wrote:
>>> On Wed, Nov 26, 2025 at 04:27:29PM -0600, Pratik R. Sampat wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 11/26/25 5:12 AM, Kiryl Shutsemau wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, Nov 25, 2025 at 11:57:51AM -0600, Pratik R. Sampat wrote:
>>>>>> The unaccepted memory structure currently only supports accepting memory
>>>>>> present at boot time. The unaccepted table uses a fixed-size bitmap
>>>>>> reserved in memblock based on the initial memory layout, preventing
>>>>>> dynamic addition of memory ranges after boot. This causes guest
>>>>>> termination when memory is hot-added in a secure virtual machine due to
>>>>>> accessing pages that have not transitioned to private before use.
>>>>>
>>>>> How does the hot-pluggable memory look in EFI memory map? I thought
>>>>> hot-pluggable ranges suppose to be declared thare. The cleanest solution
>>>>> would be to have hot-pluggable and unaccepted indicated in EFI memory,
>>>>> so we can size bitmap accordingly upfront.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'm not quite sure if I fully understand. Do you mean to refer to the
>>>> EFI_MEMORY_HOT_PLUGGABLE attribute that is used for cold plugged boot
>>>> memory? If so, wouldn't it still be desirable to increase the size of
>>>> the bitmap to what was marked as hotpluggable initially?
>>>
>>> I just don't understand how hotpluggable memory presented in EFI memory
>>> map in presence of unaccepted memory. If not-yet-plugged memory marked
>>> as unaccepted we can preallocate bitmap upfront and make unaccepted
>>> memory transparent wrt hotplug.
>>>
>>> BTW, isn't virtio-mem a more attractive target to support than HW-style
>>> hotplug?
>>
>> I would have thought so as well, such that we can just let virtio-mem take care of any acceptance before actually using hotplugged memory (exposing it to the buddy).
>>
>> Likely there is desire to support other hypervisors?
> 
> That's true. We are certainly thinking about how the RAM discard manager
> should look like with multiple states to allow guest_memfd and
> virtio-mem to work together.
> 

Right, there is the QEMU side of it as well.

> Since both paths in Linux eventually converge around
> add_memory_resource(), based on some light hacking in QEMU I could see
> similar hotplug behavior for virtio-mem as well.

For virtio-mem it would not be add_memory_resource().

Whenever we would be plugging memory we would be accepting it, and when 
we would be unplugging memory we would unaccept it.

That is, acceptance does not happen at add_memory_resource() time, but 
when virtio-mem asks the device to transition a device block from 
unplugged<->plugged.

That also means that kexec is not a concern, because the device block 
state will reflect whether memory was accepted or not.

So far the theory :)

So it will be very different to DIMM-based hotplug handling.

-- 
Cheers

David

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