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>
This commit is contained in:
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
2018-09-07 18:49:08 +02:00
committed by Boris Ostrovsky
parent 87dffe86d4
commit 197ecb3802
6 changed files with 33 additions and 6 deletions

View File

@@ -75,3 +75,12 @@ Contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Description:
Amount (in KiB) of low (or normal) memory in the
balloon.
What: /sys/devices/system/xen_memory/xen_memory0/scrub_pages
Date: September 2018
KernelVersion: 4.20
Contact: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org
Description:
Control scrubbing pages before returning them to Xen for others domains
use. Can be set with xen_scrub_pages cmdline
parameter. Default value controlled with CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES_DEFAULT.