On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 5:55 PM Michael Roth <michael.roth@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > guest_memfd currently uses the folio uptodate flag to track: > > 1) whether or not a page had been cleared before initial usage > 2) whether or not the architecture hooks have been issued to put the > page in a private state as defined by the architecture > > In practice, 2) is only actually being tracked for SEV-SNP VMs, and > there do not seem to be any plans/reasons that would suggest this will > change in the future, so this additional tracking/complexity is not > really providing any general benefit to guest_memfd users. Future plans > around in-place conversion and hugepage support, where the per-folio > uptodate flag is planned to be used purely to track the initial clearing > of folios, whereas conversion operations could trigger multiple > transitions between 'prepared' and 'unprepared' and thus need separate > tracking, will make the burden of tracking this information within > guest_memfd even more complex, since preparation generally happens > during fault time, on the "read-side" of any global locks that might > protect state tracked by guest_memfd, and so may require more complex > locking schemes to allow for concurrent handling of page faults for > multiple vCPUs where the "preparedness" state tracked by guest_memfd > might need to be updated as part of handling the fault. > > Instead of keeping this current/future complexity within guest_memfd for > what is essentially just SEV-SNP, just drop the tracking for 2) and have > the arch-specific preparation hooks get triggered unconditionally on > every fault so the arch-specific hooks can check the preparation state > directly and decide whether or not a folio still needs additional > preparation. In the case of SEV-SNP, the preparation state is already > checked again via the preparation hooks to avoid double-preparation, so > nothing extra needs to be done to update the handling of things there. > I believe this patch doesn't need to depend on stage1/stage2 and can be sent directly for review on kvm tip, is that right? This update paired with zeroing modifications[1] will make uptodate flag redundant for guest_memfd memory. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAGtprH-+gPN8J_RaEit=M_ErHWTmFHeCipC6viT6PHhG3ELg6A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
