From: Rusty Russell Subject: [ofa-general] Re: [kvm-devel] [PATCH][RFC] pte notifiers -- support for external page tables Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2007 05:56:23 +1000 Message-ID: <1189022183.10802.184.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <11890207643068-git-send-email-avi@qumranet.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: kvm-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, general@lists.openfabrics.org To: Avi Kivity Return-path: In-Reply-To: <11890207643068-git-send-email-avi@qumranet.com> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: general-bounces@lists.openfabrics.org Errors-To: general-bounces@lists.openfabrics.org List-Id: kvm.vger.kernel.org On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 22:32 +0300, Avi Kivity wrote: > [resend due to bad alias expansion resulting in some recipients > being bogus] > > Some hardware and software systems maintain page tables outside the normal > Linux page tables, which reference userspace memory. This includes > Infiniband, other RDMA-capable devices, and kvm (with a pending patch). And lguest. I can't tell until I've actually implemented it, but I think it will seriously reduce the need for page pinning which is why only root can currently launch guests. My concern is locking: this is called with the page lock held, and I guess we have to bump the guest out if it's currently running. (Oh, and this means lguest needs to do a reverse mapping somehow, but I'll come up with something). Cheers, Rusty.