Xen requires all active pagetables to be marked read-only. When the
base of the pagetable is loaded into %cr3, the hypervisor validates
the entire pagetable and only allows the load to proceed if it all
checks out.
This is pretty slow, so to mitigate this cost Xen has a notion of
pinned pagetables. Pinned pagetables are pagetables which are
considered to be active even if no processor's cr3 is pointing to is.
This means that it must remain read-only and all updates are validated
by the hypervisor. This makes context switches much cheaper, because
the hypervisor doesn't need to revalidate the pagetable each time.
This also adds a new paravirt hook which is called during setup once
the zones and memory allocator have been initialized. When the
init_mm pagetable is first built, the struct page array does not yet
exist, and so there's nowhere to put he init_mm pagetable's PG_pinned
flags. Once the zones are initialized and the struct page array
exists, we can set the PG_pinned flags for those pages.
This patch also adds the Xen support for pte pages allocated out of
highmem (highpte) by implementing xen_kmap_atomic_pte.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Zach Amsden <zach@vmware.com>