Re: [PATCH RFC] hotplug-memory: refactor online_pages to separate zone growth from page onlining

[Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 14:03 -0700, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Dave Hansen wrote:
> No, not in a Xen direct-pagetable guest.  The guest actually sees real 
> hardware page numbers (mfns) when the hypervisor gives it a page.  By 
> the time the hypervisor gives it a page reference, it already 
> guaranteeing that the page is available for guest use.  The only thing 
> that we could do is prevent the guest from mapping the page, but that 
> doesn't really achieve much.

Oh, once we've let Linux establish ptes to it, we've required that the
hypervisor have it around?  How does that work with the balloon driver?
Do we destroy the ptes when giving balloon memory back to the
hypervisor?

If we're talking about i386, then we're set.  We don't map the hot-added
memory at all because we only add highmem on i386.  The only time we map
these pages is *after* we actually allocate them when they get mapped
into userspace or used as vmalloc() or they're kmap()'d.

> I think we're getting off track here; this is a lot of extra complexity 
> to justify allowing usermode to use /sys to online a chunk of hotplugged 
> memory.

Either that, or we're going to develop the entire Xen/kvm memory hotplug
architecture around the soon-to-be-legacy i386 limitations. :)

-- Dave