Re: [PATCH v11 4/6] mm: function to offer a page block on the free list

From: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
To: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>,
	Wei Wang <wei.w.wang@intel.com>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, qemu-devel@nongnu.org,
	virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org, kvm@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-mm@kvack.org, mst@redhat.com, david@redhat.com,
	cornelia.huck@de.ibm.com, akpm@linux-foundation.org,
	mgorman@techsingularity.net, aarcange@redhat.com,
	amit.shah@redhat.com, pbonzini@redhat.com,
	liliang.opensource@gmail.com
Cc: Nitesh Narayan Lal <nilal@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v11 4/6] mm: function to offer a page block on the free list
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2017 12:44:09 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1497977049.20270.100.camel@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <b92af473-f00e-b956-ea97-eb4626601789@intel.com>

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On Mon, 2017-06-12 at 07:10 -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:

> The hypervisor is going to throw away the contents of these pages,
> right?  As soon as the spinlock is released, someone can allocate a
> page, and put good data in it.  What keeps the hypervisor from
> throwing
> away good data?

That looks like it may be the wrong API, then?

We already have hooks called arch_free_page and
arch_alloc_page in the VM, which are called when
pages are freed, and allocated, respectively.

Nitesh Lal (on the CC list) is working on a way
to efficiently batch recently freed pages for
free page hinting to the hypervisor.

If that is done efficiently enough (eg. with
MADV_FREE on the hypervisor side for lazy freeing,
and lazy later re-use of the pages), do we still
need the harder to use batch interface from this
patch?

-- 
All rights reversed

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