qemu-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[RFC PATCH 0/3] hw/pflash_cfi01: Reduce memory consumption when flash im


From: David Edmondson
Subject: [RFC PATCH 0/3] hw/pflash_cfi01: Reduce memory consumption when flash image is smaller than region
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2021 14:27:17 +0000

As described in
https://lore.kernel.org/r/20201116104216.439650-1-david.edmondson@oracle.com,
I'd like to reduce the amount of memory consumed by QEMU mapping UEFI
images on aarch64.

To recap:

> Currently ARM UEFI images are typically built as 2MB/768kB flash
> images for code and variables respectively. These images are both
> then padded out to 64MB before being loaded by QEMU.
>
> Because the images are 64MB each, QEMU allocates 128MB of memory to
> read them, and then proceeds to read all 128MB from disk (dirtying
> the memory). Of this 128MB less than 3MB is useful - the rest is
> zero padding.
>
> On a machine with 100 VMs this wastes over 12GB of memory.

There were objections to my previous patch because it changed the size
of the regions reported to the guest via the memory map (the reported
size depended on the size of the image).

This is a smaller patch which only helps with read-only flash images,
as it does so by changing the memory region that covers the entire
region to be IO rather than RAM, and loads the flash image into a
smaller sub-region that is the more traditional mixed IO/ROMD type.

All read/write operations to areas outside of the underlying block
device are handled directly (reads return 0, writes fail (which is
okay, because this path only supports read-only devices)).

This reduces the memory consumption for the read-only AAVMF code image
from 64MB to around 2MB (presuming that the UEFI image is adjusted
accordingly). It does nothing to improve the memory consumption caused
by the read-write AAVMF vars image.

There was a suggestion in a previous thread that perhaps the pflash
driver could be re-worked to use the block IO interfaces to access the
underlying device "on demand" rather than reading in the entire image
at startup (at least, that's how I understood the comment).

I looked at implementing this and struggled to get it to work for all
of the required use cases. Specifically, there are several code paths
that expect to retrieve a pointer to the flat memory image of the
pflash device and manipulate it directly (examples include the Malta
board and encrypted memory support on x86), or write the entire image
to storage (after migration).

My implementation was based around mapping the flash region only for
IO, which meant that every read or write had to be handled directly by
the pflash driver (there was no ROMD style operation), which also made
booting an aarch64 VM noticeably slower - getting through the firmware
went from under 1 second to around 10 seconds.

Improving the writeable device support requires some more general
infrastructure, I think, but I'm not familiar with everything that
QEMU currently provides, and would be very happy to learn otherwise.

David Edmondson (3):
  hw/pflash_cfi*: Replace DPRINTF with trace events
  hw/pflash_cfi01: Correct the type of PFlashCFI01.ro
  hw/pflash_cfi01: Allow read-only devices to have a smaller backing
    device

 hw/block/pflash_cfi01.c | 197 +++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------
 hw/block/pflash_cfi02.c |  75 ++++++---------
 hw/block/trace-events   |  42 +++++++--
 3 files changed, 186 insertions(+), 128 deletions(-)

-- 
2.30.0




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]