Re: [PATCH v11 0/8] KVM: allow mapping non-refcounted pages

[David Stevens]

On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 10:36 PM Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 11:57:51AM +0900, David Stevens wrote:
> > Our use case is virtio-gpu blob resources [1], which directly map host
> > graphics buffers into the guest as "vram" for the virtio-gpu device.
> > This feature currently does not work on systems using the amdgpu driver,
> > as that driver allocates non-compound higher order pages via
> > ttm_pool_alloc_page().
>
> .. and just as last time around that is still the problem that needs
> to be fixed instead of creating a monster like this to map
> non-refcounted pages.
>

Patches to amdgpu to have been NAKed [1] with the justification that
using non-refcounted pages is working as intended and KVM is in the
wrong for wanting to take references to pages mapped with VM_PFNMAP
[2].

The existence of the VM_PFNMAP implies that the existence of
non-refcounted pages is working as designed. We can argue about
whether or not VM_PFNMAP should exist, but until VM_PFNMAP is removed,
KVM should be able to handle it. Also note that this is not adding a
new source of non-refcounted pages, so it doesn't make removing
non-refcounted pages more difficult, if the kernel does decide to go
in that direction.

-David

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/8230a356-be38-f228-4a8e-95124e8e8db6@xxxxxxx/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/594f1013-b925-3c75-be61-2d649f5ca54e@xxxxxxx/