On Sun, 2020-10-11 at 01:26 -0400, harry harry wrote:
Hi QEMU/KVM developers,
I am sorry if my email disturbs you. I did an experiment and found the
guest physical addresses (GPAs) are not the same as the corresponding
host virtual addresses (HVAs). I am curious about why; I think they
should be the same. I am very appreciated if you can give some
comments and suggestions about 1) why GPAs and HVAs are not the same
in the following experiment; 2) are there any better experiments to
look into the reasons? Any other comments/suggestions are also very
welcome. Thanks!
The experiment is like this: in a single vCPU VM, I ran a program
allocating and referencing lots of pages (e.g., 100*1024) and didn't
let the program terminate. Then, I checked the program's guest virtual
addresses (GVAs) and GPAs through parsing its pagemap and maps files
located at /proc/pid/pagemap and /proc/pid/maps, respectively. At
last, in the host OS, I checked the vCPU's pagemap and maps files to
find the program's HVAs and host physical addresses (HPAs); I actually
checked the new allocated physical pages in the host OS after the
program was executed in the guest OS.
With the above experiment, I found GPAs of the program are different
from its corresponding HVAs. BTW, Intel EPT and other related Intel
virtualization techniques were enabled.
Thanks,
Harry
The fundemental reason is that some HVAs (e.g. QEMU's virtual memory
addresses) are already allocated
for qemu's own use (e.g qemu code/heap/etc) prior to the guest starting up.
KVM does though use quite effiecient way of mapping HVA's to GPA. It uses an array of
arbitrary sized HVA areas
(which we call memslots) and for each such area/memslot you specify the GPA to map to. In
theory QEMU
could allocate the whole guest's memory in one contiguous area and map it as single
memslot to the guest.
In practice there are MMIO holes, and various other reasons why there will be more that 1
memslot.
Best regards,
Maxim Levitsky