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Most of the time we can simply use the iret instruction to exit the
kernel, rather than having to use the iret hypercall - the only
exception is if we're returning into vm86 mode, or from delivering an
NMI (which we don't support yet).
When running native, iret has the behaviour of testing for a pending
interrupt atomically with re-enabling interrupts. Unfortunately
there's no way to do this with Xen, so there's a window in which we
could get a recursive exception after enabling events but before
actually returning to userspace.
This causes a problem: if the nested interrupt causes one of the
task's TIF_WORK_MASK flags to be set, they will not be checked again
before returning to userspace. This means that pending work may be
left pending indefinitely, until the process enters and leaves the
kernel again. The net effect is that a pending signal or reschedule
event could be delayed for an unbounded amount of time.
To deal with this, the xen event upcall handler checks to see if the
EIP is within the critical section of the iret code, after events
are (potentially) enabled up to the iret itself. If its within this
range, it calls the iret critical section fixup, which adjusts the
stack to deal with any unrestored registers, and then shifts the
stack frame up to replace the previous invocation.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
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This patchs adds the mechanism to allow us to patch inline versions of
common operations.
The implementations of the direct-access versions save_fl, restore_fl,
irq_enable and irq_disable are now in assembler, and the same code is
used for both out of line and inline uses.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Keir Fraser <keir@xensource.com>
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An experimental patch for Xen allows guests to place their vcpu_info
structs anywhere. We try to use this to place the vcpu_info into the
PDA, which allows direct access.
If this works, then switch to using direct access operations for
irq_enable, disable, save_fl and restore_fl.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Keir Fraser <keir@xensource.com>
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This is a fairly straightforward Xen implementation of smp_ops.
Xen has its own IPI mechanisms, and has no dependency on any
APIC-based IPI. The smp_ops hooks and the flush_tlb_others pv_op
allow a Xen guest to avoid all APIC code in arch/i386 (the only apic
operation is a single apic_read for the apic version number).
One subtle point which needs to be addressed is unpinning pagetables
when another cpu may have a lazy tlb reference to the pagetable. Xen
will not allow an in-use pagetable to be unpinned, so we must find any
other cpus with a reference to the pagetable and get them to shoot
down their references.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@kvack.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
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Implement xen_sched_clock, which returns the number of ns the current
vcpu has been actually in an unstolen state (ie, running or blocked,
vs runnable-but-not-running, or offline) since boot.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Acked-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: john stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>
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Xen requires all active pagetables to be marked read-only. When the
base of the pagetable is loaded into %cr3, the hypervisor validates
the entire pagetable and only allows the load to proceed if it all
checks out.
This is pretty slow, so to mitigate this cost Xen has a notion of
pinned pagetables. Pinned pagetables are pagetables which are
considered to be active even if no processor's cr3 is pointing to is.
This means that it must remain read-only and all updates are validated
by the hypervisor. This makes context switches much cheaper, because
the hypervisor doesn't need to revalidate the pagetable each time.
This also adds a new paravirt hook which is called during setup once
the zones and memory allocator have been initialized. When the
init_mm pagetable is first built, the struct page array does not yet
exist, and so there's nowhere to put he init_mm pagetable's PG_pinned
flags. Once the zones are initialized and the struct page array
exists, we can set the PG_pinned flags for those pages.
This patch also adds the Xen support for pte pages allocated out of
highmem (highpte) by implementing xen_kmap_atomic_pte.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Zach Amsden <zach@vmware.com>
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This patch is a rollup of all the core pieces of the Xen
implementation, including:
- booting and setup
- pagetable setup
- privileged instructions
- segmentation
- interrupt flags
- upcalls
- multicall batching
BOOTING AND SETUP
The vmlinux image is decorated with ELF notes which tell the Xen
domain builder what the kernel's requirements are; the domain builder
then constructs the address space accordingly and starts the kernel.
Xen has its own entrypoint for the kernel (contained in an ELF note).
The ELF notes are set up by xen-head.S, which is included into head.S.
In principle it could be linked separately, but it seems to provoke
lots of binutils bugs.
Because the domain builder starts the kernel in a fairly sane state
(32-bit protected mode, paging enabled, flat segments set up), there's
not a lot of setup needed before starting the kernel proper. The main
steps are:
1. Install the Xen paravirt_ops, which is simply a matter of a
structure assignment.
2. Set init_mm to use the Xen-supplied pagetables (analogous to the
head.S generated pagetables in a native boot).
3. Reserve address space for Xen, since it takes a chunk at the top
of the address space for its own use.
4. Call start_kernel()
PAGETABLE SETUP
Once we hit the main kernel boot sequence, it will end up calling back
via paravirt_ops to set up various pieces of Xen specific state. One
of the critical things which requires a bit of extra care is the
construction of the initial init_mm pagetable. Because Xen places
tight constraints on pagetables (an active pagetable must always be
valid, and must always be mapped read-only to the guest domain), we
need to be careful when constructing the new pagetable to keep these
constraints in mind. It turns out that the easiest way to do this is
use the initial Xen-provided pagetable as a template, and then just
insert new mappings for memory where a mapping doesn't already exist.
This means that during pagetable setup, it uses a special version of
xen_set_pte which ignores any attempt to remap a read-only page as
read-write (since Xen will map its own initial pagetable as RO), but
lets other changes to the ptes happen, so that things like NX are set
properly.
PRIVILEGED INSTRUCTIONS AND SEGMENTATION
When the kernel runs under Xen, it runs in ring 1 rather than ring 0.
This means that it is more privileged than user-mode in ring 3, but it
still can't run privileged instructions directly. Non-performance
critical instructions are dealt with by taking a privilege exception
and trapping into the hypervisor and emulating the instruction, but
more performance-critical instructions have their own specific
paravirt_ops. In many cases we can avoid having to do any hypercalls
for these instructions, or the Xen implementation is quite different
from the normal native version.
The privileged instructions fall into the broad classes of:
Segmentation: setting up the GDT and the GDT entries, LDT,
TLS and so on. Xen doesn't allow the GDT to be directly
modified; all GDT updates are done via hypercalls where the new
entries can be validated. This is important because Xen uses
segment limits to prevent the guest kernel from damaging the
hypervisor itself.
Traps and exceptions: Xen uses a special format for trap entrypoints,
so when the kernel wants to set an IDT entry, it needs to be
converted to the form Xen expects. Xen sets int 0x80 up specially
so that the trap goes straight from userspace into the guest kernel
without going via the hypervisor. sysenter isn't supported.
Kernel stack: The esp0 entry is extracted from the tss and provided to
Xen.
TLB operations: the various TLB calls are mapped into corresponding
Xen hypercalls.
Control registers: all the control registers are privileged. The most
important is cr3, which points to the base of the current pagetable,
and we handle it specially.
Another instruction we treat specially is CPUID, even though its not
privileged. We want to control what CPU features are visible to the
rest of the kernel, and so CPUID ends up going into a paravirt_op.
Xen implements this mainly to disable the ACPI and APIC subsystems.
INTERRUPT FLAGS
Xen maintains its own separate flag for masking events, which is
contained within the per-cpu vcpu_info structure. Because the guest
kernel runs in ring 1 and not 0, the IF flag in EFLAGS is completely
ignored (and must be, because even if a guest domain disables
interrupts for itself, it can't disable them overall).
(A note on terminology: "events" and interrupts are effectively
synonymous. However, rather than using an "enable flag", Xen uses a
"mask flag", which blocks event delivery when it is non-zero.)
There are paravirt_ops for each of cli/sti/save_fl/restore_fl, which
are implemented to manage the Xen event mask state. The only thing
worth noting is that when events are unmasked, we need to explicitly
see if there's a pending event and call into the hypervisor to make
sure it gets delivered.
UPCALLS
Xen needs a couple of upcall (or callback) functions to be implemented
by each guest. One is the event upcalls, which is how events
(interrupts, effectively) are delivered to the guests. The other is
the failsafe callback, which is used to report errors in either
reloading a segment register, or caused by iret. These are
implemented in i386/kernel/entry.S so they can jump into the normal
iret_exc path when necessary.
MULTICALL BATCHING
Xen provides a multicall mechanism, which allows multiple hypercalls
to be issued at once in order to mitigate the cost of trapping into
the hypervisor. This is particularly useful for context switches,
since the 4-5 hypercalls they would normally need (reload cr3, update
TLS, maybe update LDT) can be reduced to one. This patch implements a
generic batching mechanism for hypercalls, which gets used in many
places in the Xen code.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Ian Pratt <ian.pratt@xensource.com>
Cc: Christian Limpach <Christian.Limpach@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Cc: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
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