xen/balloon: add runtime control for scrubbing ballooned out pages
authorMarek Marczykowski-Górecki <marmarek@invisiblethingslab.com>
Fri, 7 Sep 2018 16:49:08 +0000 (18:49 +0200)
committerBoris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>
Fri, 14 Sep 2018 12:51:10 +0000 (08:51 -0400)
commit197ecb3802c04499d8ff4f8cb28f6efa008067db
tree1041826ddc2a9de936923f3563a6e51fefac7511
parent87dffe86d406bee8782cac2db035acb9a28620a7
xen/balloon: add runtime control for scrubbing ballooned out pages

Scrubbing pages on initial balloon down can take some time, especially
in nested virtualization case (nested EPT is slow). When HVM/PVH guest is
started with memory= significantly lower than maxmem=, all the extra
pages will be scrubbed before returning to Xen. But since most of them
weren't used at all at that point, Xen needs to populate them first
(from populate-on-demand pool). In nested virt case (Xen inside KVM)
this slows down the guest boot by 15-30s with just 1.5GB needed to be
returned to Xen.

Add runtime parameter to enable/disable it, to allow initially disabling
scrubbing, then enable it back during boot (for example in initramfs).
Such usage relies on assumption that a) most pages ballooned out during
initial boot weren't used at all, and b) even if they were, very few
secrets are in the guest at that time (before any serious userspace
kicks in).
Convert CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES to CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES_DEFAULT (also
enabled by default), controlling default value for the new runtime
switch.

Signed-off-by: Marek Marczykowski-Górecki <marmarek@invisiblethingslab.com>
Reviewed-by: Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Boris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>
Documentation/ABI/stable/sysfs-devices-system-xen_memory
Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
drivers/xen/Kconfig
drivers/xen/mem-reservation.c
drivers/xen/xen-balloon.c
include/xen/mem-reservation.h