[RFC PATCH 0/7] kvm: arm64: Implement SW/HW combined dirty log

[Keqian Zhu]

Hi Marc,

Do you have time to have a look at this? Thanks ;-)

Keqian.

On 2021/1/26 20:44, Keqian Zhu wrote:
> The intention:
> 
> On arm64 platform, we tracking dirty log of vCPU through guest memory abort.
> KVM occupys some vCPU time of guest to change stage2 mapping and mark dirty.
> This leads to heavy side effect on VM, especially when multi vCPU race and
> some of them block on kvm mmu_lock.
> 
> DBM is a HW auxiliary approach to log dirty. MMU chages PTE to be writable if
> its DBM bit is set. Then KVM doesn't occupy vCPU time to log dirty.
> 
> About this patch series:
> 
> The biggest problem of apply DBM for stage2 is that software must scan PTs to
> collect dirty state, which may cost much time and affect downtime of migration.
> 
> This series realize a SW/HW combined dirty log that can effectively solve this
> problem (The smmu side can also use this approach to solve dma dirty log tracking).
> 
> The core idea is that we do not enable hardware dirty at start (do not add DBM bit).
> When a arbitrary PT occurs fault, we execute soft tracking for this PT and enable
> hardware tracking for its *nearby* PTs (e.g. Add DBM bit for nearby 16PTs). Then when
> sync dirty log, we have known all PTs with hardware dirty enabled, so we do not need
> to scan all PTs.
> 
>         mem abort point             mem abort point
>               ↓                            ↓
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>         |********|        |        |********|        |        |
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>              ↑                            ↑
>         set DBM bit of               set DBM bit of
>      this PT section (64PTEs)      this PT section (64PTEs)
> 
> We may worry that when dirty rate is over-high we still need to scan too much PTs.
> We mainly concern the VM stop time. With Qemu dirty rate throttling, the dirty memory
> is closing to the VM stop threshold, so there is a little PTs to scan after VM stop.
> 
> It has the advantages of hardware tracking that minimizes side effect on vCPU,
> and also has the advantages of software tracking that controls vCPU dirty rate.
> Moreover, software tracking helps us to scan PTs at some fixed points, which
> greatly reduces scanning time. And the biggest benefit is that we can apply this
> solution for dma dirty tracking.
> 
> Test:
> 
> Host: Kunpeng 920 with 128 CPU 512G RAM. Disable Transparent Hugepage (Ensure test result
>       is not effected by dissolve of block page table at the early stage of migration).
> VM:   16 CPU 16GB RAM. Run 4 pair of (redis_benchmark+redis_server).
> 
> Each run 5 times for software dirty log and SW/HW conbined dirty log. 
> 
> Test result:
> 
> Gain 5%~7% improvement of redis QPS during VM migration.
> VM downtime is not affected fundamentally.
> About 56.7% of DBM is effectively used.
> 
> Keqian Zhu (7):
>   arm64: cpufeature: Add API to report system support of HWDBM
>   kvm: arm64: Use atomic operation when update PTE
>   kvm: arm64: Add level_apply parameter for stage2_attr_walker
>   kvm: arm64: Add some HW_DBM related pgtable interfaces
>   kvm: arm64: Add some HW_DBM related mmu interfaces
>   kvm: arm64: Only write protect selected PTE
>   kvm: arm64: Start up SW/HW combined dirty log
> 
>  arch/arm64/include/asm/cpufeature.h  |  12 +++
>  arch/arm64/include/asm/kvm_host.h    |   6 ++
>  arch/arm64/include/asm/kvm_mmu.h     |   7 ++
>  arch/arm64/include/asm/kvm_pgtable.h |  45 ++++++++++
>  arch/arm64/kvm/arm.c                 | 125 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  arch/arm64/kvm/hyp/pgtable.c         | 130 ++++++++++++++++++++++-----
>  arch/arm64/kvm/mmu.c                 |  47 +++++++++-
>  arch/arm64/kvm/reset.c               |   8 +-
>  8 files changed, 351 insertions(+), 29 deletions(-)
>