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>
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>
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>
Make the appropriate hypercalls to halt and reboot the virtual machine.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Acked-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
The hypervisor saves and restores the segment registers as part of the
state is saves while context switching. If, during a context switch,
the next process doesn't use the TLS segments, it invalidates the GDT
entry, causing the segment register reload to fault. This fault
effectively doubles the cost of a context switch.
This patch is a band-aid workaround which clears the usermode %gs
after it has been saved for the previous process, but before it gets
reloaded for the next, and it avoids having the hypervisor attempt to
erroneously reload it.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
This patch uses the lazy-mmu hooks to batch mmu operations where
possible. This is primarily useful for batching operations applied to
active pagetables, which happens during mprotect, munmap, mremap and
the like (mmap does not do bulk pagetable operations, so it isn't
helped).
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Acked-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Add Xen support for preemption. This is mostly a cleanup of existing
preempt_enable/disable calls, or just comments to explain the current
usage.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
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>
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>
When setting up the initial pagetable, which includes mappings of all
low physical memory, ignore a mapping which tries to set the RW bit on
an RO pte. An RO pte indicates a page which is part of the current
pagetable, and so it cannot be allowed to become RW.
Once xen_pagetable_setup_done is called, set_pte reverts to its normal
behaviour.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Acked-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)
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>
Xen maintains a base clock which measures nanoseconds since system
boot. This is provided to guests via a shared page which contains a
base time in ns, a tsc timestamp at that point and tsc frequency
parameters. Guests can compute the current time by reading the tsc
and using it to extrapolate the current time from the basetime. The
hypervisor makes sure that the frequency parameters are updated
regularly, paricularly if the tsc changes rate or stops.
This is implemented as a clocksource, so the interface to the rest of
the kernel is a simple clocksource which simply returns the current
time directly in nanoseconds.
Xen also provides a simple timer mechanism, which allows a timeout to
be set in the future. When that time arrives, a timer event is sent
to the guest. There are two timer interfaces:
- An old one which also delivers a stream of (unused) ticks at 100Hz,
and on the same event, the actual timer events. The 100Hz ticks
cause a lot of spurious wakeups, but are basically harmless.
- The new timer interface doesn't have the 100Hz ticks, and can also
fail if the specified time is in the past.
This code presents the Xen timer as a clockevent driver, and uses the
new interface by preference.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Xen implements interrupts in terms of event channels. Each guest
domain gets 1024 event channels which can be used for a variety of
purposes, such as Xen timer events, inter-domain events,
inter-processor events (IPI) or for real hardware IRQs.
Within the kernel, we map the event channels to IRQs, and implement
the whole interrupt handling using a Xen irq_chip.
Rather than setting NR_IRQ to 1024 under PARAVIRT in order to
accomodate Xen, we create a dynamic mapping between event channels and
IRQs. Ideally, Linux will eventually move towards dynamically
allocating per-irq structures, and we can use a 1:1 mapping between
event channels and irqs.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Xen pagetable handling, including the machinery to implement direct
pagetables.
Xen presents the real CPU's pagetables directly to guests, with no
added shadowing or other layer of abstraction. Naturally this means
the hypervisor must maintain close control over what the guest can put
into the pagetable.
When the guest modifies the pte/pmd/pgd, it must convert its
domain-specific notion of a "physical" pfn into a global machine frame
number (mfn) before inserting the entry into the pagetable. Xen will
check to make sure the domain is allowed to create a mapping of the
given mfn.
Xen also requires that all mappings the guest has of its own active
pagetable are read-only. This is relatively easy to implement in
Linux because all pagetables share the same pte pages for kernel
mappings, so updating the pte in one pagetable will implicitly update
the mapping in all pagetables.
Normally a pagetable becomes active when you point to it with cr3 (or
the Xen equivalent), but when you do so, Xen must check the whole
pagetable for correctness, which is clearly a performance problem.
Xen solves this with pinning which keeps a pagetable effectively
active even if its currently unused, which means that all the normal
update rules are enforced. This means that it need not revalidate the
pagetable when loading cr3.
This patch has a first-cut implementation of pinning, but it is more
fully implemented in a later patch.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
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>
