Re: [PATCHv7 02/14] mm: Add support for unaccepted memory

[Tom Lendacky <thomas.lendacky@amd.com>]

On 6/14/22 07:02, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
> UEFI Specification version 2.9 introduces the concept of memory
> acceptance. Some Virtual Machine platforms, such as Intel TDX or AMD
> SEV-SNP, require memory to be accepted before it can be used by the
> guest. Accepting happens via a protocol specific to the Virtual Machine
> platform.
> 
> There are several ways kernel can deal with unaccepted memory:
> 
>   1. Accept all the memory during the boot. It is easy to implement and
>      it doesn't have runtime cost once the system is booted. The downside
>      is very long boot time.
> 
>      Accept can be parallelized to multiple CPUs to keep it manageable
>      (i.e. via DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT), but it tends to saturate
>      memory bandwidth and does not scale beyond the point.
> 
>   2. Accept a block of memory on the first use. It requires more
>      infrastructure and changes in page allocator to make it work, but
>      it provides good boot time.
> 
>      On-demand memory accept means latency spikes every time kernel steps
>      onto a new memory block. The spikes will go away once workload data
>      set size gets stabilized or all memory gets accepted.
> 
>   3. Accept all memory in background. Introduce a thread (or multiple)
>      that gets memory accepted proactively. It will minimize time the
>      system experience latency spikes on memory allocation while keeping
>      low boot time.
> 
>      This approach cannot function on its own. It is an extension of #2:
>      background memory acceptance requires functional scheduler, but the
>      page allocator may need to tap into unaccepted memory before that.
> 
>      The downside of the approach is that these threads also steal CPU
>      cycles and memory bandwidth from the user's workload and may hurt
>      user experience.
> 
> Implement #2 for now. It is a reasonable default. Some workloads may
> want to use #1 or #3 and they can be implemented later based on user's
> demands.
> 
> Support of unaccepted memory requires a few changes in core-mm code:
> 
>    - memblock has to accept memory on allocation;
> 
>    - page allocator has to accept memory on the first allocation of the
>      page;
> 
> Memblock change is trivial.
> 
> The page allocator is modified to accept pages on the first allocation.
> The new page type (encoded in the _mapcount) -- PageUnaccepted() -- is
> used to indicate that the page requires acceptance.
> 
> Architecture has to provide two helpers if it wants to support
> unaccepted memory:
> 
>   - accept_memory() makes a range of physical addresses accepted.
> 
>   - range_contains_unaccepted_memory() checks anything within the range
>     of physical addresses requires acceptance.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
> Acked-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>	# memblock
> Reviewed-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
> ---
>   include/linux/page-flags.h | 31 +++++++++++++
>   mm/internal.h              | 12 +++++
>   mm/memblock.c              |  9 ++++
>   mm/page_alloc.c            | 89 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
>   4 files changed, 139 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 

> diff --git a/mm/memblock.c b/mm/memblock.c
> index e4f03a6e8e56..a1f7f8b304d5 100644
> --- a/mm/memblock.c
> +++ b/mm/memblock.c
> @@ -1405,6 +1405,15 @@ phys_addr_t __init memblock_alloc_range_nid(phys_addr_t size,
>   		 */
>   		kmemleak_alloc_phys(found, size, 0, 0);
>   
> +	/*
> +	 * Some Virtual Machine platforms, such as Intel TDX or AMD SEV-SNP,
> +	 * require memory to be accepted before it can be used by the
> +	 * guest.
> +	 *
> +	 * Accept the memory of the allocated buffer.
> +	 */
> +	accept_memory(found, found + size);

The SNP support will kmalloc a descriptor that can be used to supply the 
range to the hypervisor using the GHCB/VMGEXIT. But kmalloc won't work 
when called this early, so we are likely to need an early_accept_memory or 
some kind of flag to know whether this is an early call or not in order to 
use a static descriptor in the file.

Thanks,
Tom

> +
>   	return found;
>   }
>