On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 04:05:27PM +0000, Sean Christopherson wrote:
On Tue, Aug 23, 2022, David Hildenbrand wrote:
On 19.08.22 05:38, Hugh Dickins wrote:
On Fri, 19 Aug 2022, Sean Christopherson wrote:
On Thu, Aug 18, 2022, Kirill A . Shutemov wrote:
On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 10:40:12PM -0700, Hugh Dickins wrote:
On Wed, 6 Jul 2022, Chao Peng wrote: But since then, TDX in particular has forced an effort into preventing (by flags, seals, notifiers) almost everything that makes it shmem/tmpfs.
Are any of the shmem.c mods useful to existing users of shmem.c? No. Is MFD_INACCESSIBLE useful or comprehensible to memfd_create() users? No.
But QEMU and other VMMs are users of shmem and memfd. The new features certainly aren't useful for _all_ existing users, but I don't think it's fair to say that they're not useful for _any_ existing users.
Okay, I stand corrected: there exist some users of memfd_create() who will also have use for "INACCESSIBLE" memory.
As raised in reply to the relevant patch, I'm not sure if we really have to/want to expose MFD_INACCESSIBLE to user space. I feel like this is a requirement of specific memfd_notifer (memfile_notifier) implementations -- such as TDX that will convert the memory and MCE-kill the machine on ordinary write access. We might be able to set/enforce this when registering a notifier internally instead, and fail notifier registration if a condition isn't met (e.g., existing mmap).
So I'd be curious, which other users of shmem/memfd would benefit from (MMU)-"INACCESSIBLE" memory obtained via memfd_create()?
I agree that there's no need to expose the inaccessible behavior via uAPI. Making it a kernel-internal thing that's negotiated/resolved when KVM binds to the fd would align INACCESSIBLE with the UNMOVABLE and UNRECLAIMABLE flags (and any other flags that get added in the future).
AFAICT, the user-visible flag is a holdover from the early RFCs and doesn't provide any unique functionality.
That's also what I'm thinking. And I don't see problem immediately if user has populated the fd at the binding time. Actually that looks an advantage for previously discussed guest payload pre-loading.
If we go that route, we might want to have shmem/memfd require INACCESSIBLE to be set for the initial implementation. I.e. disallow binding without INACCESSIBLE until there's a use case.
I can do that.
Chao