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Commit 2a31b9db authored by Paolo Bonzini's avatar Paolo Bonzini
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kvm: introduce manual dirty log reprotect



There are two problems with KVM_GET_DIRTY_LOG.  First, and less important,
it can take kvm->mmu_lock for an extended period of time.  Second, its user
can actually see many false positives in some cases.  The latter is due
to a benign race like this:

  1. KVM_GET_DIRTY_LOG returns a set of dirty pages and write protects
     them.
  2. The guest modifies the pages, causing them to be marked ditry.
  3. Userspace actually copies the pages.
  4. KVM_GET_DIRTY_LOG returns those pages as dirty again, even though
     they were not written to since (3).

This is especially a problem for large guests, where the time between
(1) and (3) can be substantial.  This patch introduces a new
capability which, when enabled, makes KVM_GET_DIRTY_LOG not
write-protect the pages it returns.  Instead, userspace has to
explicitly clear the dirty log bits just before using the content
of the page.  The new KVM_CLEAR_DIRTY_LOG ioctl can also operate on a
64-page granularity rather than requiring to sync a full memslot;
this way, the mmu_lock is taken for small amounts of time, and
only a small amount of time will pass between write protection
of pages and the sending of their content.

Signed-off-by: default avatarPaolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
parent 8fe65a82
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