2 Commits (3b827c1b3aadf3adb4c602d19863f2d24e7cbc18)

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
Jeremy Fitzhardinge	3b827c1b3a	xen: virtual mmu ... Xen pagetable handling, including the machinery to implement direct pagetables. Xen presents the real CPU's pagetables directly to guests, with no added shadowing or other layer of abstraction. Naturally this means the hypervisor must maintain close control over what the guest can put into the pagetable. When the guest modifies the pte/pmd/pgd, it must convert its domain-specific notion of a "physical" pfn into a global machine frame number (mfn) before inserting the entry into the pagetable. Xen will check to make sure the domain is allowed to create a mapping of the given mfn. Xen also requires that all mappings the guest has of its own active pagetable are read-only. This is relatively easy to implement in Linux because all pagetables share the same pte pages for kernel mappings, so updating the pte in one pagetable will implicitly update the mapping in all pagetables. Normally a pagetable becomes active when you point to it with cr3 (or the Xen equivalent), but when you do so, Xen must check the whole pagetable for correctness, which is clearly a performance problem. Xen solves this with pinning which keeps a pagetable effectively active even if its currently unused, which means that all the normal update rules are enforced. This means that it need not revalidate the pagetable when loading cr3. This patch has a first-cut implementation of pinning, but it is more fully implemented in a later patch. Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com> Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>	18 years ago
Jeremy Fitzhardinge	5ead97c84f	xen: Core Xen implementation ... This patch is a rollup of all the core pieces of the Xen implementation, including: - booting and setup - pagetable setup - privileged instructions - segmentation - interrupt flags - upcalls - multicall batching BOOTING AND SETUP The vmlinux image is decorated with ELF notes which tell the Xen domain builder what the kernel's requirements are; the domain builder then constructs the address space accordingly and starts the kernel. Xen has its own entrypoint for the kernel (contained in an ELF note). The ELF notes are set up by xen-head.S, which is included into head.S. In principle it could be linked separately, but it seems to provoke lots of binutils bugs. Because the domain builder starts the kernel in a fairly sane state (32-bit protected mode, paging enabled, flat segments set up), there's not a lot of setup needed before starting the kernel proper. The main steps are: 1. Install the Xen paravirt_ops, which is simply a matter of a structure assignment. 2. Set init_mm to use the Xen-supplied pagetables (analogous to the head.S generated pagetables in a native boot). 3. Reserve address space for Xen, since it takes a chunk at the top of the address space for its own use. 4. Call start_kernel() PAGETABLE SETUP Once we hit the main kernel boot sequence, it will end up calling back via paravirt_ops to set up various pieces of Xen specific state. One of the critical things which requires a bit of extra care is the construction of the initial init_mm pagetable. Because Xen places tight constraints on pagetables (an active pagetable must always be valid, and must always be mapped read-only to the guest domain), we need to be careful when constructing the new pagetable to keep these constraints in mind. It turns out that the easiest way to do this is use the initial Xen-provided pagetable as a template, and then just insert new mappings for memory where a mapping doesn't already exist. This means that during pagetable setup, it uses a special version of xen_set_pte which ignores any attempt to remap a read-only page as read-write (since Xen will map its own initial pagetable as RO), but lets other changes to the ptes happen, so that things like NX are set properly. PRIVILEGED INSTRUCTIONS AND SEGMENTATION When the kernel runs under Xen, it runs in ring 1 rather than ring 0. This means that it is more privileged than user-mode in ring 3, but it still can't run privileged instructions directly. Non-performance critical instructions are dealt with by taking a privilege exception and trapping into the hypervisor and emulating the instruction, but more performance-critical instructions have their own specific paravirt_ops. In many cases we can avoid having to do any hypercalls for these instructions, or the Xen implementation is quite different from the normal native version. The privileged instructions fall into the broad classes of: Segmentation: setting up the GDT and the GDT entries, LDT, TLS and so on. Xen doesn't allow the GDT to be directly modified; all GDT updates are done via hypercalls where the new entries can be validated. This is important because Xen uses segment limits to prevent the guest kernel from damaging the hypervisor itself. Traps and exceptions: Xen uses a special format for trap entrypoints, so when the kernel wants to set an IDT entry, it needs to be converted to the form Xen expects. Xen sets int 0x80 up specially so that the trap goes straight from userspace into the guest kernel without going via the hypervisor. sysenter isn't supported. Kernel stack: The esp0 entry is extracted from the tss and provided to Xen. TLB operations: the various TLB calls are mapped into corresponding Xen hypercalls. Control registers: all the control registers are privileged. The most important is cr3, which points to the base of the current pagetable, and we handle it specially. Another instruction we treat specially is CPUID, even though its not privileged. We want to control what CPU features are visible to the rest of the kernel, and so CPUID ends up going into a paravirt_op. Xen implements this mainly to disable the ACPI and APIC subsystems. INTERRUPT FLAGS Xen maintains its own separate flag for masking events, which is contained within the per-cpu vcpu_info structure. Because the guest kernel runs in ring 1 and not 0, the IF flag in EFLAGS is completely ignored (and must be, because even if a guest domain disables interrupts for itself, it can't disable them overall). (A note on terminology: "events" and interrupts are effectively synonymous. However, rather than using an "enable flag", Xen uses a "mask flag", which blocks event delivery when it is non-zero.) There are paravirt_ops for each of cli/sti/save_fl/restore_fl, which are implemented to manage the Xen event mask state. The only thing worth noting is that when events are unmasked, we need to explicitly see if there's a pending event and call into the hypervisor to make sure it gets delivered. UPCALLS Xen needs a couple of upcall (or callback) functions to be implemented by each guest. One is the event upcalls, which is how events (interrupts, effectively) are delivered to the guests. The other is the failsafe callback, which is used to report errors in either reloading a segment register, or caused by iret. These are implemented in i386/kernel/entry.S so they can jump into the normal iret_exc path when necessary. MULTICALL BATCHING Xen provides a multicall mechanism, which allows multiple hypercalls to be issued at once in order to mitigate the cost of trapping into the hypervisor. This is particularly useful for context switches, since the 4-5 hypercalls they would normally need (reload cr3, update TLS, maybe update LDT) can be reduced to one. This patch implements a generic batching mechanism for hypercalls, which gets used in many places in the Xen code. Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com> Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org> Cc: Ian Pratt <ian.pratt@xensource.com> Cc: Christian Limpach <Christian.Limpach@cl.cam.ac.uk> Cc: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>	18 years ago