Re: HVM/PVH Balloon crash

[Elliott Mitchell <ehem+xen@m5p.com>]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 10:03:51AM +0200, Jan Beulich wrote:
> On 06.09.2021 22:47, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 06, 2021 at 09:52:17AM +0200, Jan Beulich wrote:
> >> On 06.09.2021 00:10, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> >>> I brought this up a while back, but it still appears to be present and
> >>> the latest observations appear rather serious.
> >>>
> >>> I'm unsure of the entire set of conditions for reproduction.
> >>>
> >>> Domain 0 on this machine is PV (I think the BIOS enables the IOMMU, but
> >>> this is an older AMD IOMMU).
> >>>
> >>> This has been confirmed with Xen 4.11 and Xen 4.14.  This includes
> >>> Debian's patches, but those are mostly backports or environment
> >>> adjustments.
> >>>
> >>> Domain 0 is presently using a 4.19 kernel.
> >>>
> >>> The trigger is creating a HVM or PVH domain where memory does not equal
> >>> maxmem.
> >>
> >> I take it you refer to "[PATCH] x86/pod: Do not fragment PoD memory
> >> allocations" submitted very early this year? There you said the issue
> >> was with a guest's maxmem exceeding host memory size. Here you seem to
> >> be talking of PoD in its normal form of use. Personally I uses this
> >> all the time (unless enabling PCI pass-through for a guest, for being
> >> incompatible). I've not observed any badness as severe as you've
> >> described.
> > 
> > I've got very little idea what is occurring as I'm expecting to be doing
> > ARM debugging, not x86 debugging.
> > 
> > I was starting to wonder whether this was widespread or not.  As such I
> > was reporting the factors which might be different in my environment.
> > 
> > The one which sticks out is the computer has an older AMD processor (you
> > a 100% Intel shop?).
> 
> No, AMD is as relevant to us as is Intel.
> 
> >  The processor has the AMD NPT feature, but a very
> > early/limited IOMMU (according to Linux "AMD IOMMUv2 functionality not
> > available").
> > 
> > Xen 4.14 refused to load the Domain 0 kernel as PVH (not enough of an
> > IOMMU).
> 
> That sounds odd at the first glance - PVH simply requires that there be
> an (enabled) IOMMU. Hence the only thing I could imagine is that Xen
> doesn't enable the IOMMU in the first place for some reason.

Doesn't seem that odd to me.  I don't know the differences between the
first and second versions of the AMD IOMMU, but could well be v1 was
judged not to have enough functionality to bother with.

What this does make me wonder is, how much testing was done on systems
with functioning NPT, but disabled IOMMU?  Could be this system is in an
intergenerational hole, and some spot in the PVH/HVM code makes an
assumption of the presence of NPT guarantees presence of an operational
IOMMU.  Otherwise if there was some copy and paste while writing IOMMU
code, some portion of the IOMMU code might be checking for presence of
NPT instead of presence of IOMMU.


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