Re: [PATCH v8 1/8] mm/memfd: Introduce userspace inaccessible memfd

[Sean Christopherson]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2022, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 26.09.22 16:48, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 26, 2022 at 12:35:34PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > > When using DAX, what happens with the shared <->private conversion? Which
> > > "type" is supposed to use dax, which not?
> > > 
> > > In other word, I'm missing too many details on the bigger picture of how
> > > this would work at all to see why it makes sense right now to prepare for
> > > that.
> > 
> > IIUC, KVM doesn't really care about pages or folios. They need PFN to
> > populate SEPT. Returning page/folio would make KVM do additional steps to
> > extract PFN and one more place to have a bug.
> 
> Fair enough. Smells KVM specific, though.

TL;DR: I'm good with either approach, though providing a "struct page" might 
avoid
       refactoring the API in the nearish future.

Playing devil's advocate for a second, the counter argument is that KVM is the
only user for the foreseeable future.

That said, it might make sense to return a "struct page" from the core API and
force KVM to do page_to_pfn().  KVM already does that for HVA-based memory, so
it's not exactly new code.

More importantly, KVM may actually need/want the "struct page" in the 
not-too-distant
future to support mapping non-refcounted "struct page" memory into the guest.  
The
ChromeOS folks have a use case involving virtio-gpu blobs where KVM can get 
handed a
"struct page" that _isn't_ refcounted[*].  Once the lack of mmu_notifier 
integration
is fixed, the remaining issue is that KVM doesn't currently have a way to 
determine
whether or not it holds a reference to the page.  Instead, KVM assumes that if 
the
page is "normal", it's refcounted, e.g. see kvm_release_pfn_clean().

KVM's current workaround for this is to refuse to map these pages into the 
guest,
i.e. KVM simply forces its assumption that normal pages are refcounted to be 
true.
To remove that workaround, the likely solution will be to pass around a tuple of
page+pfn, where "page" is non-NULL if the pfn is a refcounted "struct page".

At that point, getting handed a "struct page" from the core API would be a good
thing as KVM wouldn't need to probe the PFN to determine whether or not it's a
refcounted page.

Note, I still want the order to be provided by the API so that KVM doesn't need
to run through a bunch of helpers to try and figure out the allowed mapping 
size.

[*] 
https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAD=HUj736L5oxkzeL2JoPV8g1S6Rugy_TquW=PRt73YmFzP6Jw@mail.gmail.com