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2020-11-15KVM: X86: Implement ring-based dirty memory trackingPeter Xu1-0/+103
This patch is heavily based on previous work from Lei Cao <lei.cao@stratus.com> and Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>. [1] KVM currently uses large bitmaps to track dirty memory. These bitmaps are copied to userspace when userspace queries KVM for its dirty page information. The use of bitmaps is mostly sufficient for live migration, as large parts of memory are be dirtied from one log-dirty pass to another. However, in a checkpointing system, the number of dirty pages is small and in fact it is often bounded---the VM is paused when it has dirtied a pre-defined number of pages. Traversing a large, sparsely populated bitmap to find set bits is time-consuming, as is copying the bitmap to user-space. A similar issue will be there for live migration when the guest memory is huge while the page dirty procedure is trivial. In that case for each dirty sync we need to pull the whole dirty bitmap to userspace and analyse every bit even if it's mostly zeros. The preferred data structure for above scenarios is a dense list of guest frame numbers (GFN). This patch series stores the dirty list in kernel memory that can be memory mapped into userspace to allow speedy harvesting. This patch enables dirty ring for X86 only. However it should be easily extended to other archs as well. [1] https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10471409/ Signed-off-by: Lei Cao <lei.cao@stratus.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com> Message-Id: <20201001012222.5767-1-peterx@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>